Reluctant Partners
by scotchplaid
Summary: Bering & Wells AU - Myka and Helena are "reluctant partners" in a fraud investigation. Helena's life was wrecked when a former lover and her daughter's father was sent to prison for defrauding clients. Now she's under suspicion again, and the only way she can clear her name is to work with Agent Myka Bering to uncover the real criminal.
1. Chapter 1

**A/N - I know, I've already got too many fics going on! But practice makes perfect, and I'm still trying to get this whole White Collar/"unlikely team" thing right. Updates will be slow in coming, but they will come.**

She had hold of Christina's hand, and then Christina was gone. A moment's distraction as Nate's daughter, Adelaide, asked permission to join her friends, Nate looking at her helplessly and shrugging, and Christina had slipped away. Nate had run to the visitor's center to alert the fairground's security force, and she had started retracing their steps, the dairy hall, the merry-go-round, the barn. That was Christina's favorite place, especially the area where the lambs and baby goats, all the barnyard young, were available for petting and pictures. Helena looked down at her phone, no text within the last few minutes; the most recent one from Nate had informed her that security was on the lookout for a five-year-old girl, long dark hair, dressed in pink shorts, sandals, and a pink-and-yellow flowered top.

Helena pushed her way through the people filling the fair's midway, which was wider than many city streets. She almost hadn't come today, anticipating the crowds. It was the last day of the fair and the hottest. She felt guilty for blotting the sweat beading on her neck and forehead. Her daughter was missing and she was thinking about how sweaty she was. Helena crushed the damp napkin in her hand before throwing it into one of the trash receptacles that were placed every 20 feet, or so it seemed. She was fighting against the flow of the crowds. It was late in the afternoon, and tomorrow was a workday. Everyone looked tired and sunburned, even babies in strollers were red-faced and crying. A dark head, a flash of pink, and she would spin around, sometimes crying out "Christina!" before realizing that the little girl looked nothing like her daughter. Ahead of her she could see the rounded rooftop of the barn, the size and color of one you would see on a farm, not some fair-sized replica. Earlier this afternoon she had appreciated that touch of reality, a gesture toward the origin of state fairs among the cotton candy and carnival rides. Now she could think only of how big it was, and how long it would take to search when her daughter might be on the other side of the fairgrounds.

The crowds parted, and to her left several feet away, a little girl in pink shorts and a pink-and-yellow top was swinging the hand of a woman walking beside her. Her face was turned up to the woman, and she was smiling. Helena could make out a dark ring around her mouth and she was holding a half-eaten cookie. "Christina." Her daughter didn't hear her, the people around her didn't hear her either. Her throat had been so tight that she had barely been able to croak her name. "Christina!" Helena shouted and began shouldering aside parents and teenagers, couples and senior citizens. "Christina!"

The woman walking with Christina stopped and scanned the people who were shuffling and moving strollers from Helena's path. The woman raised her arm and waved it, shouting "Over here!" and Christina dropped her cookie, jumping up and down, yelling "Mommy! Mommy!" Stumbling as she left the concrete of the midway for the flattened grass and patches of bare earth on the margin, Helena scooped Christina up in her arms, burying her nose in the crook of her daughter's neck, inhaling the smells of chocolate and sun-warmed skin and baby shampoo. It was all the air she needed to breathe. Christina giggled. "You're tickling me, Mommy," she said and wriggled to be put down.

Helena released her but firmly held onto her hand. The other woman was talking, her voice calm and unhurried. "She was at our stand, asking if she had enough money to buy her mommy a cookie. She was about 50 cents short." Amused, she added, "We were doing a pretty good business, so I thought we could weather the loss."

Unsure if she could keep her voice steady, Helena said, "Thank you. I turned around for just a moment and then she was . . . she was . . . ." She faltered and drew a deep breath. "She was gone, and I was frantic."

The woman nodded. "She's safe, possibly on a chocolate overdrive, but safe." The gentle smile turned teasing. "Just in case you decide you have to report me to the police, you better have my name." She offered her hand. "Myka Bering."

Helena recognized that Myka was striving to lighten the moment, and she joined in with relief, shaking Myka's hand firmly. "Helena Wells, in case you decide to report me to child protective services."

Christina turned the sunniest of faces up at them, pleased that she was able to introduce her mother to her new best friend. Helena knew she would have to have yet another talk with her about running off to investigate whatever caught her interest or, this time, running off to carry out whatever idea had crossed her mind, but not right now. Right now she needed to – Nate. She needed to call Nate. She took her phone from the outer pocket of her handbag as Myka was suggesting that they follow her back to a . . . shack?

"Go on," Myka was saying, "make your call and have your friends or family join us at the Cookie Shack. The shade's almost as good as the cookies. And it's free." The voice was still easy, still warm, and the playful smile, which disarmingly crooked her lips, seemed to have increased its wattage. "Heck, we'll throw in the cookies for free, too."

For the first time since she had seen Christina at Myka's side, Helena truly looked at the woman who had rescued her daughter. A baseball cap sat lightly on wavy brown hair gathered into a ponytail. Her features matched the warm, unhurried quality of her voice, inviting Helena's gaze to linger on curious hazel eyes and a firm chin softened by a mouth that had already demonstrated its willingness to curve into a smile. Her jeans and polo shirt, which Helena noticed only now had "Cookie Shack" embroidered on the breast, looked smothering but Myka looked cool. By contrast, Helena felt there wasn't an inch of her sundress that wasn't plastered to her skin. She tried to console herself with the thought that she was a frazzled mother – panic and a heat index near 100 were the ingredients for a perfect sweat storm – but it didn't feel very consoling next to Myka's unblemished composure.

She called Nate on the way to the Cookie Shack, Christina having deserted her to dance around Myka's leggy strides and list everything she had seen at the fair. She mentioned ponies (miniature horses, Helena silently amended) several times, but at each "I saw ponies," Myka would exclaim with the same note of wonder, "Wow, ponies, really?" or "That must've been exciting" and Christina would giggle and enthusiastically nod her head. When they arrived at the stand, a brightly colored structure with plates of cookies and glasses of milk painted on its walls, people were standing three and four deep at the counter and the picnic tables nearby were already claimed. Myka didn't break stride, leading Helena and Christina toward a picnic table invitingly placed under a shade tree. A man in cargo shorts and a faded tee was sitting on the table top, hunched over a paper plate full of cookies. His cheeks bulging, he waved at Myka, motioning her over. "Hey, did you find her?" His question came out in a spray of cookie crumbs. Christina peeked around Myka's legs and then ran back to her mother, theatrically shrieking in alarm. "I guess you did. Welcome back, little girl lost." His gaze traveled past Christina to Helena. He straightened and leaped from the table, brushing crumbs from his shirt. With a flourish of his napkin, he swept the bench with more gallantry than efficiency. "Right this way, milady. Pete Lattimer at your service."

"It's hard enough stomaching the heat without a display of the so-called Lattimer charm," Myka growled, perching on the end of the bench and inviting Helena and Christina to join her. "We want customers to enjoy their cookies, not throw them up."

Clearly not her boyfriend, Helena thought, as she sat down and settled Christina next to her. She wasn't sure why it mattered, what Pete was to Myka, but he seemed too boyishly clumsy, too boyish for her period, the design on his tee a peeling screen print of Spiderman swinging between skyscrapers. But their affection for each other was also clear, Myka's gibe as fondly mocking as one that Helena would lob at her brother.

"Just because you're, you know, imper - . . . um . . . impre- . . . immune, immune," Pete landed on the word with relief, "to the magic doesn't mean she is." He scowled at Myka and then at his tee, sadly fingering a mustard stain just above Spiderman's head. He extended the hand to Helena to shake. "Women, they want to keep the magic to themselves, but it can't be contained." He wagged his head dolefully. "You know I'm Pete, but you are?"

The shirt might have been designed for a ten-year-old boy and Pete's flirting bordered on the clownish, but the appraising look he gave her as they shook hands was sharp and surprisingly serious. He might act the frat boy but an adult was at the controls. Helena's estimation of him rose, but she still wouldn't put him with Myka. Nor was she on the market for his particular brand of magic. "Helena," she said, and as Christina burrowed into her, she responded by holding her tighter, "and Christina."

"We're having a celebration now that the lost have been found," Myka said, grinning up at Pete. "Cookies and lemonade for everyone. Or iced tea or water or whatever people want to drink instead." Her expression turned wry. "Unfortunately the menu is pretty much limited to cookies."

Helena tipped her daughter's chin up, inspecting the smears of melted chocolate around her mouth. "I think Christina may have already had more than her share." She opened her handbag, took out a Wet Wipe, and despite Christina's efforts to bat it away, began to scrub at the chocolate. "How many cookies did you have?" While Helena critically evaluated her work, Christina unfolded three fingers and firmly said, "Two."

"But you held three fingers up," Helena pointed out.

"I like her math," Pete said. "It's a lot like we see from guys with a whole lot of letters after their names."

A cynical flicker of her eyelids was Myka's only comment. She turned her attention back to Helena's hasty clean-up of Christina, which included a thorough wiping of her daughter's hands. "I gave her one cookie, but I can't answer for how many my mother might have sneaked her."

Clean fingers didn't aid Christina in her counting. "I had three cookies," she amended, spreading wide all four fingers and her thumb.

"Maybe we should stay away from the cookies," Helena suggested, "but lemonade would be lovely."

"I'll go put the order in." Myka smiled at Christina, her gaze lifting from her and resting on Helena. "Child- or intrepid-explorer-size?"

"Do you have a mischief-maker size?" Making light of Christina's disappearance didn't stop a shiver of fear from running through her as she remembered turning around and not seeing her daughter beside her.

"It's our largest, called the Lattimer," Myka laughed, "and I don't think Christina's grown into it yet." Helena felt the gentleness in Myka's eyes like a steadying touch on her shoulder, as if Myka knew where her thoughts had gone and was reminding her that Christina was with her now, safe, if growing a little restless.

Leaving them in the dubious pleasure of Pete's company, Myka disappeared through the back door of the Cookie Shack. While Pete entertained Christina with his imitation of a squirrel, mainly limited to his tucking into both cheeks the masticated remains of the awe-inspiring number of cookies he had crammed into his mouth, Helena scanned the crowds for Nate. He would be one more middle-aged man in a golf shirt among thousands strolling between vendors selling everything from giant bratwurst to framed paintings of past state fairs. She hadn't known him long – she and Christina were recent transplants to the city – but she knew he was hoping that their "just friends" date at the fair would turn into something more. She could honestly say that the day had been more eventful than she had expected, but not in the way he wanted.

The back door opened and Myka emerged with a tray of paper cups, a stray wave of lemonade occasionally breaking over a rim. Behind her was a man carrying a tray holding a pitcher of lemonade and a pile of cookies of various colors and sizes. His age suggested to Helena that he could be Myka's father, but it was the similarity in their strides, relaxed yet swiftly covering ground, and the long legs powering the strides that confirmed the relationship. The resemblance was less marked when he glanced at her and Christina and she saw that his features, which were otherwise much like his daughter's, were set in a chilly reserve. His greeting was similarly cool, and Myka, as she passed out the cups of lemonade, sent him an unmistakable glare.

"And that's why they keep Mr. Giggles there in the back. He'd scare off the customers," Pete muttered under his breath, hooking a leg over the bench and sitting down next to Helena.

"It had to have been scary, losing your daughter like that," Myka's father said, and Helena wasn't sure if he had offered it as a comment or as an accusation. His next words made clear which it was. "When they're little like that and looking for trouble, you have to keep them close. Especially when there are so many strangers around. Never know what one of them might take it into his head to do."

"Dad," Myka said sharply, her glare intensifying.

Helena reddened but lifted her chin and looked at him steadily. She had been subject to worse criticism by old men even more disgruntled, old disgruntled men in bespoke suits who had had the power to -. She needed to concentrate on the here and now, and in this here and this now, she and Christina were the guests of the owners of the Cookie Shack, one of whom – whether it was because he was cranky from the heat, disliked children, or, based on Pete's muttered assessment, was always out of sorts, was determined to underscore her failings as a parent. Not that she needed to be reminded. Summoning what she hoped he would find a sufficiently grateful smile, Helena said, "I was terrified, and I'm very thankful that it was your daughter Christina found."

Myka's father had placed the pitcher and cookies in the center of the table with a faintly begrudging air, as if to suggest that being reunited with her child should be reward enough. Free cookies and lemonade only condoned her lapse. She must have sounded conciliatory enough because he said with gruff pride, "Your little girl couldn't have found anyone safer or better able to help her. Myka's FBI."

"Dad!" It came out as a bark. "We've talked about -"

But Helena wasn't listening. The awful turn her day was taking had just grown worse. She had lost her daughter only to find her walking on the other side of the fairgrounds and holding the hand of an FBI agent. The last time she had sat down with an FBI agent, it hadn't been over cookies and lemonade, and the conversation hadn't been friendly. Pete nudged her in the ribs. "We're not the scary type with guns." Reaching across the table, he picked out what looked like a peanut butter cookie with a jelly center. "I mean, we carry guns," he qualified, breaking the cookie in half and eating the center first. "Mmmm, strawberry jam, I keep telling them to get serious and go with grape, but this'll have to do." He stuffed the two halves into his mouth, Christina watching him in fascination. "We carry guns," he repeated, "but the most danger we face is a paper cut. Myka and me, we work financial crimes."

Helena tried to imagine Pete unwinding spurious trading accounts and couldn't get beyond the picture of him laboriously counting on his fingers. Myka, on the other hand, it didn't seem unbelievable to imagine her meticulously taking apart the financial statements of a dummy corporation. She was walking her father back to the cookie stand, her face still marked with annoyance. Helena suddenly could see that face, grim and suspicious, across from her at a conference table, stacks of financial reports like walls between them, and it cut at her more sharply than she expected. Shutting out the image – it wasn't real, couldn't ever be real, not anymore – Helena concentrated on the breeze stirring her hair, the cool feel of the cup in her hand. She acknowledged that this had been a lovely reprieve from the terror of losing Christina and the barrage of emotions that had followed upon finding her: relief, gratitude, joy, dismay, guilt, anger. She had been overwhelmed, so she had gladly let Myka with her quiet assurance take charge, take her in hand as she had literally taken Christina in hand, but the reprieve was over.

When Myka returned, Helena decided, she would make some excuse to leave and, with any luck, intercept Nate before he arrived at the Cookie Shack. Christina, however, seemed happy to sneak a cookie when she thought her mother wasn't looking and to match Pete's funny faces. Of all the times when her daughter should be impatient to go somewhere new or cranky and needing a nap, she was both alert and content to stay where she was. Adding to the poor timing of her escape was Nate's sun-flushed face as a gap in the crowds appeared. He gave her a vigorous wave and, Adelaide in tow, wound his way among the scattered picnic tables. After tousling Christina's hair and greeting her with a mildly scolding "You gave us a scare, kiddo," he and Adelaide sat on the opposite bench. She slumped with obvious boredom. She no sooner took her phone from a pocket of her shorts than her father's stern look had her stuffing it back in.

Pete had left to bring more glasses, and in a few minutes, he and Myka returned with extra glasses, lemonade, and cookies. Myka's father wasn't with them. Helena made the introductions, and she noticed how Myka glanced from her to Nate, trying, discreetly, to pinpoint their relationship to one another. Conversation stumbled from one inoffensive topic to the next, the heat, the size of the crowds, the city's traffic. Nate ate several of the cookies, appreciating in particular the chocolate cherry black walnut ones. Adelaide sipped at her lemonade, her eyes darting from the fairgoers trampling the grounds to the rides in the arcades area and back to the table; she was imprisoned between adults and a five-year-old girl, her boredom, like a bird in a cage, fluttering uselessly, futilely in glances seeking escape. There was no mention of Pete's and Myka's jobs, and Nate vaguely acknowledged that he and Helena worked together without saying where they worked or what they did. Nor did Myka or Pete ask. There was no reason for asking – she and Myka would never see each other again. Helena was surprised that she felt almost as disappointed as she did relieved. Take away what she did for a living, and Myka could be . . . . That didn't matter either. Christina had become a warm leaden weight against Helena's side, her eyes closed. Time to go.

Among her repeated expressions of gratitude, Pete's jokes about weighting Christina down with cookies so she couldn't go running off, and Christina's whines of protest at being nudged awake, Helena never lost the sense that Myka continued to observe her with interest. Every time she looked at Myka she encountered a gaze that was more searching than their coincidental meeting justified. Yet although its grip was firm as they shook hands before she and Nate and the girls started their long trek back to the main gates, Myka's hand gave hers no meaningful squeeze nor did it try to extend the contact. Myka's good-bye was equally as brief and natural, "I'm glad I was there to help."

Without a backward look, Helena joined Nate, lacing Christina's fingers between her own. He held Christina's other hand. There would be no more disappearances. They had gone only a short distance before Adelaide wandered over to a booth displaying jewelry on velvet-covered stands. She tried on bracelets and rings while Christina pouted and hugged Helena's hips. As she tried to disentangle herself without provoking a temper tantrum, she heard a vaguely familiar voice saying, "Hey, hey, Helena, hey." She turned around to see Pete jogging toward her. He pulled at her to draw her away from the jeweler's booth where Nate was limiting how much he would contribute toward Adelaide's purchase. Helena, making sure she had hold of Christina, reluctantly followed him.

"I know this may sound weird but just hear me out." He linked his hands and rubbed them against the back of his head. "When my gut tells me stuff, it's never wrong, okay, and my gut's telling me there was some sort of, I dunno, spark between you and Myka." He gave his head one more vigorous rub before he dropped his arms and leaned in closer to her. "Maybe you're going to tell me you're with Nate or you don't play that way, but that's not what I sense, and Mykes," he exhaled noisily, as if he were about to break a confidence, "she's a lady-lover. She doesn't announce it or anything like that 'cause it's not her style, but she is and she likes you. Likes you as a person and as, you know, someone she might want to ask out." He paused, giving her a significant look as he dug into a side pocket of his cargo shorts. "If she got a little encouragement." He retrieved a crumpled piece of paper and tucked into the palm of her hand, which was uncurling to receive it.

Helena stared at her hand, mystified, as Pete said, with obvious satisfaction, "I thought so." Glancing behind her, which suggested that Nate and Adelaide were done buying jewelry, he lowered his voice. "She'd kill me if she knew I was doing this, but she's the best. Don't let the law enforcement thing scare you off. Mykes always treats people straight up. Even if you're on the fence about the dating thing, you look like someone who might want another friend, and you can't find a better one. I ought to know." He lifted his arm in a half-wave at Nate and Adelaide before spinning in the opposite direction – almost taking out a family of four – and jogging back toward the Cookie Shack.

"What was that about?" Nate stared after Pete's retreating form.

Helena automatically slid the piece of paper into her handbag. She would throw it away later. "Nothing. He thought we might have forgotten something." She waited for Christina, who had a small child's impeccable sense of timing, to contradict her, but she was too busy yawning and knuckling her eyes to correct her mother.

Outside the gates, about to go their separate ways to find their cars, Nate suggested they have an early dinner at a pizza parlor close by the fairgrounds. Helena begged off, saying that she wanted to get Christina home and take care of a few chores before she had to prepare for the work week. Nate was disappointed but he nodded in understanding. She fobbed him off with a "Maybe, if I have time" when he brought up seeing a movie together next weekend. Deciding not to press any harder, he and Adelaide began drifting toward one of the far parking lots, Adelaide too busy thumbing texts to her friends to do more than mutter a tardy "Yeah, see you." Nate's smile was broad and he winked at Christina before wishing them a good evening. With a reminder of "Coffee run tomorrow, don't forget," he backstepped before clapping his daughter on the shoulder and guiding her across the pavement.

A spark. Was that what it was, what she had felt looking into that attractively friendly face? Not that Myka wasn't also physically attractive, lovely really, but it was her helpfulness, her casual taking charge to which Helena had first responded. As any terrified mother who thought she had lost her child would. Had Myka truly felt a spark dealing with a perspiring, overwrought woman who had managed to misplace her daughter? A brief exchange with a stranger at the counter of the Cookie Shack would have held more promise than their meeting. Helena suspected that the only reliable communication Pete could expect from his gut was on the order of "When's our next meal?"

Though to be fair to Pete, Helena wouldn't trust herself to recognize a spark, let alone act on it. The last time she had let an attraction overrule her common sense, it had turned out to be a disaster. Not a complete disaster. Christina had been born in the middle of that disaster, and while her daughter could cause crises without even trying, she was also what redeemed a time Helena would otherwise to choose to forget. With her elbow, Helena nudged opened the door from the garage into the townhome's hallway. They had stopped at a grocery store on the way home; not only were they practically out of milk but she also had had nothing to take for lunch during the week. She peered into the paper bag, which held a half-gallon of 2% milk, assorted TV dinners of 250 calories or less, and deli meat and bread for sandwiches. Humble lunches, but then this was a humble townhome, even for a rental, and the car, whose engine was ticking like a clock behind her as it cooled, was an economy sedan bought used. From the life she once led, this didn't represent a step down, it was a free fall. But just as she divorced Christina from all the mistakes and poor decisions that had, first, resulted in her conception and, second, in their retreat to this city where she knew hardly anyone, Helena tried to separate what was then from what was now. 'Then' didn't matter anymore, 'now' did, and 'now' was the modest home, the modest job, the modest life.

Christina had run ahead of her into the kitchen, clambering up one of the stools set at the center island to watch her unload their groceries. More from exhaustion than a passionate attachment to the package of cheap Princess Elsa hair accessories (a flimsy brush, a comb that could easily snap in two, and a handful of barrettes) that she had hugged to her chest, Christina had thrown a tantrum when Helena wouldn't allow her to put it in their grocery cart. Finally Helena had picked her up, her legs fiercely kicking, and plopped her into the cart, too tired to think of a better way of coping with her daughter's demands. The tantrum had ended by the time they wheeled into line at the cash register, although Helena could have sworn that Christina's shrieking had shattered the glass doors in the refrigerated section. The only evidence that remained of the storm were the dirty tracks that Christina's tears had left on her cheeks. Dirt, dried chocolate, tiny wispy threads of the cotton candy that Nate had shared with her; their day at the fair was written on her face. Helena wondered what story about the fair her own face might tell. Oh, yes, she knew – "Mother Abandons Five-Year-Old Child at Fair." Not the kind of story that would generate a romantic spark in the breast of an FBI agent.

But the last thing Helena wanted, would ever want, was an FBI agent with love in her eyes. She had seen many things in the eyes of the agents who had "interviewed" her countless times about her relationship with Stuart McKnight but love or any feeling remotely warm or human hadn't been among them. At the beginning, there had been no flame, no spark with Stuart. She had just emerged from a long, painful ending to a relationship that had been neither long nor particularly drama-filled. All these years later, Helena still wasn't sure why it had ended so badly, not badly in the my-life-is-forever-changed way that her relationship with Stuart later ended, but as badly as she thought she would ever experience at the time. She hadn't been unfaithful to Giselle or treated her poorly, but she had been absent, a lot, and when she had been available, she hadn't always been as attentive as she should have been. When Giselle had literally thrown out of her apartment a small shopping bag with Helena's few personal items (toothbrush, make-up, a sleep shirt she hardly ever wore) and followed it with a stream of invective that confirmed every insecurity Helena had about her looks, character, hygiene, mastery of etiquette, fashion sense, hobbies, and, last but not least, sexual performance, she decided it would be a cold day in hell before she ever went out on more than a date for coffee.

Then Stuart, with his unflappable charm, invited her to dinner. It had been an extraordinarily cool day for early August, and she had turtled her head into the neckline of her suit coat. The chill breeze that had accompanied his invitation should have been her first warning that hell might be freezing over. He was the CEO of a rival investment firm, a boutique firm like the one she and Charles managed, and they had met when one of her clients wanted to see how the gilded customer service that Wells Financial Management Services provided him (courtesy of the assiduous attentions of Charles Wells, President and CEO, and Helena Wells, Executive Vice President and CFO) stacked up against what McKnight Investments had to offer. Had he not been one of their most important clients, Helena wouldn't have lowered herself to bidding for his accounts in front of a competitor (or she would have demanded that Charles give the presentation if he felt so strongly about keeping the old curmudgeon). But Stuart had treated it as a game, even pulling off some hoary magic tricks like "finding" a quarter behind Walter's ear, and though Helena had groaned at the cheesy showmanship ("Where does your money disappear?" Stuart had asked him with a wink and then answered his own question by passing his hand over Walter's ear and displaying the coin. "It doesn't, not with McKnight. It's always your money, we never lose sight of that fact.") Walter had eaten it up, but, in the end, he didn't change investment advisors, especially when Helena sweetened the deal by knocking off 75 basis points off their usual fee. She and Stuart had ridden down to the lobby together in Walter's private elevator and, giving her a tiny paper flower that, thankfully, he didn't "find" behind her ear but plucked from the air to all appearances, he said casually, "Have dinner with me. It'll be fun."

Fun. It had been. Hot dogs and beer at a Yankees game. She happened to like baseball and the box was good, if not spectacular. What was spectacular was his introducing her to the Yankees, all of them, after the game and then his taking her to one of the most exclusive restaurants in the city for dessert. He had reserved a private dining room and better than the dessert was not having to change out her jeans and t-shirt to meet the restaurant's dress code.

Nothing fazed Stuart, not even when she bluntly told him a year later that her birth control had failed and she, they, were pregnant. He cocked his head, surveying the Michelin 5 star-equipped kitchen in which they were standing and in which he only ever used the $50 microwave on the counter, and said, "I guess we'll need to make room for the baby food and a high chair." She hadn't moved in with him, they had never discussed marriage; in fact, Helena wasn't sure she was in love with him. But just as she had accepted his invitation to dinner, she didn't object to his assumption now that she was carrying his child, she would move in. His place was (much) bigger and (much) nicer, and, coincidentally, it was closer to the office of her ob-gyn. Similarly, when she developed problems during her pregnancy that necessitated virtual bedrest, she didn't object to his suggestion that she take more than a leave of absence from Wells Financial, she resign altogether. If she wanted to do all the hand-holding and reassuring that had become her job, she could work at McKnight. If she decided she wanted to return to her computer science roots and develop the perfect algorithm, the one that guaranteed above-market rates of return in the most bear-like of markets, he definitely wanted her at McKnight.

So she moved in, she resigned, and for the next 18 months, which saw Christina turn one, she was happy. They still didn't talk marriage, she still wasn't sure she loved him, but Giselle hardly figured in her thoughts. If she needed confirmation that she was capable of the deepest devotion, she had only to look at her daughter. Then shortly after Christina's birthday, which Stuart had celebrated in his usual over-the-top fashion, staging it as an all-day event complete with a petting zoo, magicians, and acrobats, his real life, the one that underpinned the fairy tale in which Helena had been living, erupted into it. Except that she hadn't known she was living in a fairy tale. Though she had begun working, in fact, on the "perfect algorithm," imperfect approximations of which she had given to Stuart to test with small, proprietary investments made by McKnight, she knew very little about the inner workings of his company. She had met his senior officers at dinners and parties they hosted, and Stuart talked to her, always in general terms, about his clients and his frustrations and successes, but when she thought about McKnight Investments, which wasn't often, she invariably thought of it as "Stuart's business."

It was a fundamental error, because when federal agents arrived at their home with a search warrant and subjected her to numerous "interviews" over the ensuing months, his business became her business. She came to deeply regret the iterations of the "perfect algorithm" she had given to him. Agents found copies on practically every computer in the office and its viral ability to manifest itself everywhere undercut her claims that she had no connection to the company.

It had been fraud on a grand scale, not Madoff-large but as pervasive. There was virtually no investor who hadn't been misled and whose funds hadn't been funneled into a series of shell companies owned by Stuart McKnight, who then used them to support his lifestyle. If you want to see where the money went, the agents told her, you don't have to look very far. The penthouse they lived in, the vacation homes in Spain and Greece and St. Thomas (she had only ever been to the one in the Caribbean, she hadn't known of the other two), the luxury cars, the artwork. Even Christina's birthday party had been paid for by someone's nest egg. Everyone thought she had been in on it with him, including Charles. Stuart may have been defrauding his clients long before she met him, but she must have figured out what he was doing at some point. She wasn't stupid, she knew this business. For God's sake, hadn't she ever read a McKnight investment prospectus? Hadn't she wondered about his relationship with his stepfather, Vincent Crowley, who had been convicted of insider trading in the late 1980s? Had she lost her mind when she had had her baby?

Charles had literally screamed these questions and more at her. Wells Financial was under a cloud too, thanks to her. Agents had shown up at his office with a warrant for any records the firm had of her employment. They had unearthed her old computer from a storeroom and carted out every document with her name on it. His reputation might never recover, _he_ might never recover. Helena let his denunciations and his near-hysteria wash over her without responding. It was all water, all roar – the investigation, the agents, the lawyer she had to retain, Stuart's lawyers – and she let it carry her where it would. Nothing mattered except protecting Christina, who comprehended nothing of what was going on but sensed everything. Whenever Stuart tried to hold her, she cried, and whenever he disappeared from view, she cried. Helena felt much the same way but she didn't need to add her wailing to Christina's; she sobbed and howled enough for the both of them. Helena couldn't recall much from those two years, which had begun when Stuart offhandedly told her that McKnight was being investigated and ended when he was sentenced to 12 years in prison. She remembered only that it rained, every day. Impossible, of course, but how else to explain the ocean floor she walked on, the surface of the water so far above her that she couldn't see a glimmer of light?

When the water retreated, when the sun finally shone, she was without a home, a job, a bank account with a positive balance, or friends on whose support she could depend. She had Christina and Charles's begrudging offers of assistance. She would never work for Wells Financial again She hadn't been charged with any crime, her sins had been complaisance and willed ignorance, but no securities firm would hire her, not even the one she (partially) owned. She made an unreliable living for the next year and a half by taking one short-term position after another and covering the inevitable shortfalls with the money she had received from selling part of her interest in Wells to Charles. When the last of the temporary positions ended, she still owed money to the law firm that had represented her and to the creditors Stuart had left hanging that didn't care that her name wasn't on the agreements or that she and Stuart had never married. Selling what remained of her investment in Wells didn't solve her problems, although it took care of most of her debts. She needed a job, something steady and on the books. Helena hadn't had a true stroke of luck in almost four years, but she got one then. An old friend of the family called her. He owned a mid-sized investment company in the Midwest. He wasn't looking for an investment specialist or a financial analyst, he had plenty of those; he needed someone who knew both computers and finance, who could build systems and the reports that could be run off them. His company was growing, and he needed to upgrade his IT to facilitate and promote the growth. He needed her . . . if she were interested.

Helena had nothing to keep her in the East. Hers had always been a somewhat rootless life. She and Charles had lived in seven different countries growing up, and though she had lived in New York for the past several years, she had never considered it any more a home than London or Hong Kong or San Francisco or Sydney. Stuart was in a federal prison over a thousand miles away, but their relationship had ended long before he was sentenced. As for Charles, he had decided he would fare better if he relocated to Wells's new London office. Christina was of a portable age, only four and a half. She would adjust quickly to a new place. Hers wasn't just the plasticity of the very young, it had something of her father's adaptability, which, Helena reminded herself on those days when Christina reminded her most strongly of Stuart, was not a bad thing –in small doses. What kind of fraud could she get up to in pre-school, after all?

Not a very convincing one if her best effort to get out of a bath before bed involved thrusting her hands, palms out, and declaring "I'm clean, I'm clean" while her day at the fair could still be read on her face. Helena ran the bath water and filled the tub with a cherry-scented foaming soap; Christina would emerge smelling like a throat lozenge. As both the bubbles and the cherry scent multiplied, Helena was reminded, oddly, of Myka. Maybe she was reminded of the cookies with the jelly center that Pete had avidly eaten. The jelly had been strawberry, not cherry, but they were both berries. The association was logical enough. Or maybe, unconsciously, she had been wanting an excuse to think about her, and she would have recalled Myka looking relaxed and attractively athletic in her polo shirt and jeans even if the soap had smelled like citrus or pine trees instead.

She hadn't been on anything remotely resembling a date in a long time. She had disposed of her sex drive when she had disposed of everything else that would bring Stuart to mind. For years she had been comfortable with a sexuality that had no fixed point, that didn't rely on types or looks or gender. More recently she thought she had gotten comfortable with a sexuality that, far from floating or roaming, hibernated in a cave. If, after all this time, it was blinking awake, well, that was what the marvel – and privacy – of online shopping was for. Helena turned the faucet off and tested the water one more time. Not too hot, not too cold. She went to the head of the stairs and called for Christina to come up and take her bath. She had work to do yet, clothes to iron for tomorrow, and a child to put to bed. This was her life, and for now, she was content with it. She wasn't looking to change a thing, not a single thing.


	2. Chapter 2

Instinctively she flung an arm across the bed; Andi's side was still empty. Myka groaned and ground the heels of her palms into her eyes. Andi hadn't slept in this bed for more than six months, but the habit of reaching out and touching Andi's hip, lightly, affectionately, hadn't yet left her. Opening her eyes, she rolled over and picked up her phone from the nightstand. 5:30. She had 15 minutes before she had to get up and start her run. She hated it when she woke up early, especially when she woke up because she had reached for Andi and Andi wasn't there. Andi was in California, Los Angeles specifically, following her dream . . . yet again. After another groan, Myka sat up and pushed herself to the edge of the bed. Last night had been a long night, everyone trying, after the fairgrounds closed at 9:00, to put away and clean up as much as possible, but her parents and some of the "Shack staff" would be at the Cookie Shack today doing the big clean and shut down for next year. As she stumbled across her bedroom to pull a pair of shorts and a tank from her dresser, her thoughts touched briefly on Helena. She hoped that her day was getting off to a better start.

Her morning runs had two or three different loops through her neighborhood, more for the sake of variety than concern that she could be stalked or attacked. She might be white collar FBI, but she was still FBI. Her snicker didn't diminish her pride, but, really, the most dangerous weapon she generally handled was a heavy-duty stapler. As she dodged trash cans and recycling bins set out for pick-up, she recalled how her father had bragged about her being FBI to Helena. It wasn't the same as working for the CIA, but, still, she didn't like to advertise the fact, and yet her father never failed to find an opportunity to mention it to practically everyone they met. Most people were curious, full of questions, while others were more noncommittal, murmuring, "I'm sure that's interesting work," turning back to the books they were perusing, if she were helping out her dad at the bookstore, or placing their orders for cookies, if she were helping out at the Cookie Shack. But a few reacted as Helena had, a coolness entering their expressions, their smiles shrinking. Myka didn't take it personally; they were reacting to their image of the agency, what they had heard or read. They didn't know its true workings any more than they knew her.

But she had to admit that she had been disappointed when she saw Helena's face freeze at her father's reassurance that Christina had been in the best hands possible. Holding out her hands, Myka stared at them. They were nice hands, okay, ordinary hands. There was nothing "agenty" about them, as Pete might say. They didn't frequently hold guns or flash badges or handcuff people; usually they were typing on a keyboard or working through a financial statement. They could just have easily been an accountant's hands. From the moment that her father had said those three letters, however, Helena had been in retreat. Physically she had never left the table, but the dark eyes in which Myka had seen so many emotions, panic, gratitude, guilt, humor, friendliness, had seemed to grow darker and the only emotion Myka could see in them when she and Helena would exchange looks was wariness.

Why was she moony about a woman she had met only yesterday, who obviously didn't like the FBI, and who was probably dating the stolid-looking guy, Nate, who had brought her to the fair? Myka increased her pace, frustrated that she was spending time thinking about Helena. Now that her off-and-on again relationship with Andrea Martino was off, over for good – or at least until the next time that Andi swept back into town and swept her off her feet –it was perfectly normal to be attracted to another woman. Probably even healthy. But maybe this time, finally, it could be someone who was both available – not only emotionally but physically as well – and ready for a relationship? She had had hopes that she had found her future in Andi, although everything about Andi had signaled that she had her sights set on a future that wasn't in this city and wasn't with an agent who was a few pay grades away yet from being a Special Agent in Charge. Andi was an actress, and despite having crashed and burned in Los Angeles a few years earlier, and New York before that, she had been eager for the next opportunity that would take her back. Even when they had been at a fever pitch in their relationship, Andi had always kept one eye on her phone, looking for a good news text from her agent.

When she had gotten that text, an offer to star as a recurring character on a new series produced by a streaming service, Andi hadn't hesitated, but this time she had also asked Myka to join her. The more cynically-minded, Pete among them, suggested that Andi had extended the invitation because she knew that Myka wouldn't uproot herself for a limited run on a show that would garner, at most, a couple million viewers. Myka had a healthy skepticism when it came to doing her job, but she tried not to give her friends and lovers the same gimlet-eyed look – it wasn't a trust builder. She believed that Andi, a part of her, anyway, really did want them to be together, on her terms. In the end, they had agreed that Andi should take her third or fourth shot at stardom unencumbered, and if it didn't work out, then they could see where they were. Because you know I'll be here, Myka hadn't been able to squelch the uncharitable thought.

Letting herself back into the house, Myka turned on the Keurig for what would be the first of her many cups of coffee. She opened her refrigerator and pondered the cancerous sprawl of yogurt containers on the topmost shelf. For someone who acted high-minded about sugar, she managed to get her daily allowance and more of it by relying on slightly more subtle delivery systems, like yogurt. As she ate her yogurt and waited for the Keurig to stop its tiny trickling of coffee into a mug, she glanced around her remodeled kitchen and tried to convince herself that the quartz countertops and new cabinets made up for the fact that there was no one to chide her for her excessive reliance on caffeine or, better yet, sidle up to her sweaty body and convince her that they had time for a long, hot shower together before they had to leave for work.

Forty minutes later she was on her way into downtown, caught in the rush hour crush and inching off the exit ramp into one of the main thoroughfares. The Bureau's field office was in a nondescript high rise in a cluster of skyscrapers that gave the city its claim to a skyline. As her car idled at a stoplight, she drank from her second cup of coffee – in addition to her run, a stop at Starbucks was also part of her morning routine – and reviewed her schedule for the day. Most of it would be taken up with finalizing her report on a money laundering operation that she and Pete had helped break up, which had crossed several states and involved payday lenders and rent-to-own stores. Other law enforcement had been involved as well, but she and Pete had logged a lot of miles and spent more nights in hotel rooms than she cared to repeat anytime soon. Drug money had been used to finance loans and store credit to customers who, if they could no longer meet the astronomical monthly interest payments, were then coerced into transporting drugs to homes and businesses, sometimes hundreds of miles away, for further refining or distribution. It had been a departure of sorts from their usual work, but the novelty had been lost in the grind of endless phone calls, meetings, and coordination of personnel and information. They hadn't rushed into drug houses, guns at the ready, or faced down criminals sporting military hardware; they had been working out of conference rooms in local sheriff offices and police departments, their most dangerous weapons their smart phones.

It wasn't shaping up to be a bad day at all, a low-stress one, which was a rarity, and she was smiling in anticipation of Pete's greeting, which usually involved finding the most absurd news item on the Internet and asking her opinion about it. On Friday, he had found a story about a dispute between two men over the ownership of a twelve-foot wooden Santa that they had carved from a tree together. Pete had asked her to put her "brilliant legal mind to the question and 'render a decision.'" He had giggled at "render," before saying, "You're gonna say it should be chopped in two, right, to see which guy loves it more?"

"No," Myka said over her shoulder, as she started walking toward the breakroom, which housed a couple of microwaves, a refrigerator, and, most importantly, a catered coffee service. The coffee was freshly brewed and regularly replenished. She couldn't ask for more. "I'd bring their spouses in and see which one of them was closest to taking an axe to it – or him – at this point. The winner would be the one who wasn't on the verge of committing murder. It's all about bringing the crime rate down, Pete."

This morning Pete had no "From the Archives of the Absurd" greeting. He stopped by her cubicle only long enough to advise her to get her coffee and meet him in the office of their boss, Special Agent in Charge Irene Frederic. Pete claimed, always under his breath, that Irene had been Special Agent in Charge when Hoover had run the FBI. Granted, there was an agelessness about her that led a wacky kind of credence to the view, but putting cryogenesis or starting at the FBI at age 12 aside, the Bureau's history as an all white, all male (and wholly closeted) preserve continued to weigh against women of color becoming Special Agents in Charge over field offices or assistant directors. Name the last woman who was a director, Myka silently demanded of the heavens as she hurried to pour herself a cup of coffee. But knowing Irene, she thought that Special Agent in Charge Frederic might actually have a chance. Myka had been a junior-level employee, a couple of years out of law school, when Irene had been chosen to head the field office, and she had developed a ferocious case of hero worship. Although her admiration had matured as she had grown in the work, her respect for Irene had only deepened. Consequently, coffee was sloshing over the rim of her cup as she walk-raced to the conference room. The heat stung her fingers but she hated to be late, especially when it was Irene who had called the meeting.

She was surprised that she and Pete were the only agents in the room besides Irene and more surprised to see Assistant U.S. Attorney Sam Martino at the table. It wasn't all that unusual to have a representative from Justice attend one of their meetings, but typically it was in the context of a pending court case, and none of her cases were at that stage, not even the money-laundering one. A woman sat next to him, her dark hair drawn back in a ponytail, and she was wearing a stylishly cut dress suit. She sprang up from the conference table to shake the non-coffee-smelling hand that Myka offered her. "I'm Kelly Hernandez, from the district attorney's office." Flashing a cheeky grin at Pete, she added, "Glad to meet his professional better half."

Myka glanced from one to the other. "Softball?" Pete's other hobbies were gaming and poker, and she didn't see Kelly hunched over a controller or eating Doritos from a family-size bag with Pete and his poker buddies.

"Kelly's our shortstop. Great fielder except that she overthrows home plate." Pete wadded a stick of gum into mouth. Myka hoped it wasn't bubble gum, not with Irene in the room.

"Says the man who spends his time at home plate whiffing at strikes," Kelly jeered. Then she blushed and said sheepishly, "This is probably a conversation we should have outside work."

"I agree, Ms. Hernandez, as time is short, and I'm sure that we all have much to get done." Irene had been reviewing a file, which, while not auspiciously thick, had nonetheless brought a frown to a face that Myka thought was best characterized as unreadable. Irene's expression was always the same, regardless of how well or badly an investigation was going. Pete joked that she cracked a smile only at Christmas-time. "If you or Mr. Martino would care to start?"

Sam didn't clear his throat but his play with his suit sleeves and the resulting rattle of his cufflinks on the table was as good an indicator of his nervousness. Irene could do it to anyone. Myka had seen assistant directors falter for words under her impassive regard. He shot Myka a beleaguered glance before beginning, "Kelly and I are here because of a call she received . . . ."

Myka knew she should be paying attention, but there remained an underlying awkwardness between her and Sam. The look he had given her had had everything to do with feeling that he was arguing a case before the Supreme Court – with Irene capably standing in for all nine justices – and nothing to do with Andi. Yet it had been uncannily like the look he had given her when she told him that she wanted to date his sister instead of him, dread, disbelief, and frustration commingled. He and Andi had been born 18 months apart, and their mother had claimed more than once to Myka that they had been trying to outdo each other since they were toddlers. Anything that Sam could do, Andi wanted to do better, and vice versa. While Sam had gone to law school and taken a position in the district U.S. Attorney's office and Andi had left for Los Angeles to become an actress, the one's position was hardly less reliant on dramatic skills than the other's. It took acting chops to persuade a jury, and Sam wasn't so proud that he hadn't asked his sister for some basic pointers on working an audience.

Myka had met Sam when he had been the attorney assigned to help prosecute an embezzlement case. She was the investigator who had assembled the evidence sufficient to arrest the president and chief financial officer of a regional bank, and both before and during the trial, Sam had relied on her attention to detail and analysis of the facts. They had spent days and nights going over the case, marshaling the evidence into a narrative that explained the inception of the crime to its discovery. Neither had been reluctant to work long hours or to eat dinner from a vending machine. Myka would think later that they had mistaken their mutual admiration of each other's work ethic as attraction and had read too much into their occasional escapes from the Bureau's office to have a drink or a late evening snack. Even so, their nascent relationship hadn't developed much beyond an occasional heated goodnight kiss; sleeping together would have required a larger commitment of time and energy than they were willing to claw back from their jobs.

That had been the status when, on a Saturday afternoon that had found them working together on some details of the investigation that he intended to use in a cross-examination of a defense witness, Sam had invited her to his condo for dinner. Myka had agreed, uncertain whether it was a sign that he wanted to deepen their relationship and equally uncertain that it was something she wanted. Her last clear memory of that night was of seeing a woman in Sam's kitchen who turned away from a stovetop crowded with skillets and pots bristling with spaghetti on the boil. She had Sam's fair coloring, but the resemblance ended there, and the amusement in her greeting revealed a playfulness that Myka had yet to see from him. "I've gone from being your wingman to a third wheel? It's about time, big brother." It would be an exaggeration to say that she hadn't given Sam a second thought after meeting Andi, but he had been, at best, a shadow at Myka's side during dinner, indistinct and visible only from the corner of her eye. At the end of the night, it was Andi who walked her to her car and surprised her with a kiss that ignited hormones Myka didn't know she had. Two days later Andi was back in New York, but Myka had already ended things with Sam, and the next weekend, with a rare Monday off in her back pocket, she flew to New York to see the woman she was convinced was the love of her life.

. . . . She heard Pete stop chewing gum long enough to whistle between his teeth. He slid toward Myka an even slimmer file than the one Irene had been reviewing. She opened it, understanding Pete's whistle. On top of a small stack of documents was a photo of Helena Wells. It was a shot of her descending the steps of a government building, a courthouse, given the crowd of reporters at the bottom and the ring of men shielding her. Myka closed her eyes in frustration; for the first time in years, she had let her mind wander during a meeting, and this was the result. What had Sam been talking about? As rapidly as she could, she fit the various words that had filtered through into a rough chronology. An anonymous source had called the city's district attorney's office about potentially fraudulent activity at a securities firm. Helena hadn't been the source, of that she was sure. She remembered too well how Helena had reacted at "FBI."

Pete was looking at her expectantly. He hadn't yet said anything about meeting Helena and her daughter. He was always willing to let her take the lead when it came to dealing with Irene. He was man enough to admit, he would say (when he and Myka were safely out of Irene's hearing), that she scared the hell out of him. "We know her slightly. We met her yesterday at the fair," Myka said cautiously. "She had gotten separated from her daughter, who had taken off to buy a cookie for her from my parents' stand. We returned her daughter to her, gave them some free cookies, and that was it. An upset, frazzled mom, that's all I took her for." She knew that neither Sam nor Irene was accusing her of anything; they couldn't have known until just now that she and Helena had met. But Myka knew that a defensive note had crept into her voice, and she wasn't willing to volunteer, not yet, how Helena had seemed to fold in on herself once she learned of her and Pete's connection to the FBI.

"That may be what she is now, but a few years ago, she was better known as Stuart McKnight's girlfriend." Sam wasn't trying to read her expression, although he might have wondered why she was blushing. Irene hadn't missed it, however. Myka blushed the harder. Great, she had progressed from being attracted to unreliable actresses to felons. More precisely, girlfriends of felons. Stuart McKnight's trial had garnered a fair amount of interest even this deep in the Midwest, but she had been working a fraud case of her own and dealing with the first of her break-ups with Andi. Both the water cooler gossip (maybe bottled water gossip was more apt) and the news coverage had been no more than a buzz in her ears.

"You said your source contacted you twice, but they mentioned Helena only the second time?" Pete leaned over the elbow he had planted on the table to peer at Helena's picture.

"Could be they didn't know who was behind it at first," Kelly said. "The first voice mail we got suggested we should look into some alternative energy start-ups that Amundson's firm had encouraged their clients to invest in. The second voice mail we got said that Helena Wells was working for Amundson Securities and did we know what she had done. There was no name, no valid call-back number. He must have found one of the few working pay phones still around. Without anything more solid we weren't going to follow up, but then we found out that two of the start-ups he had identified on the first message had just filed for bankruptcy."

Amundson. Myka heard the thud of the other shoe dropping. No, the other boot dropping, a work boot with a steel-reinforced toe. Amundson was a very, very powerful name in the city, in the state, to be linking to a potential fraud. The family had been an economic, political, and social force for generations. Nolan Amundson was a former lieutenant governor and the CEO of Amundson Companies, Ltd., a corporate giant involved mainly in agribusiness activities, but the family had other business interests as well, including the investment firm. He was chairman of Amundson Securities, and two of his sons were executive officers. It was common knowledge that Kelly's boss had political ambitions of his own. It could end a career – or make it – to launch an investigation into the Amundson family. Yet why would someone as reputedly sharp as Nolan Amundson hire a woman who was linked to a highly publicized securities fraud? Myka shook her head. There was still too much that was unknown to start making assumptions.

"Even if the start-ups' bankruptcies are the result of fraud, it doesn't mean that the Amundsons had a hand in it. Unless you have something that shows a stronger connection to them than a couple of voice mails and –" Myka gestured toward Helena's picture without looking at it, "the fact that Stuart McKnight's ex-girlfriend works for their wealth management company, what would we be investigating, exactly?"

"We do have something stronger," Kelly said swiftly. "We received in the mail, again anonymously, internal documents from the company, memos and emails about misleading information on the start-ups being given to investors."

"It's not a smoking gun, but it's enough for you to start poking your noses in Amundson's business." Sam didn't quite phrase it as a question to Irene, but the "isn't it" was unmistakable.

Irene's mouth almost imperceptibly twitched up. "Let us review the information and consult with Washington. We'll get back to you." Her eyes were almost closed as she turned to Kelly. "Quite a coincidence, isn't it? Information potentially detrimental to the Amundson family lands on your desk just as, rumor has it, your boss is about to declare a run for Congress."

Kelly's smile was closer to a wince, but she didn't look away from Irene. "The sword cuts two ways. When an Amundson's involved, it's always a delicate situation. Besides, if investors have been defrauded, the investigation would go to you, anyway. Adwin knows that, and it's why we wanted to reach out to the U.S. Attorney's office as well." With a proud, slightly defiant tilting of her chin, she added, "He doesn't need an Amundson on his wall to burnish his record."

Pete mouthed "Burnished?" to Myka and waggled his eyebrows as Irene said smoothly to Kelly, "We've always had a good relationship with the district attorney's office, and I look forward to the opportunity of working with Adwin again."

There ensued the usual promises of follow-up and cooperation, which, Myka knew, Irene would choose to only strategically observe. A minimum level of sincerity achieved, Sam and Kelly shut their attaché cases with almost perfect synchronicity. As they left the conference room, Pete called out to Kelly, "Next time I'm at the plate, out of the park, I tell you." Not bothering to look back at him, she held her arm out to the side, moving her thumb and fingers in imitation of a mouth talking at full speed.

"She's got you down," Myka said as they turned toward their desks. They passed the darkened office of Steve Jinks, Assistant Special Agent in Charge, and she resisted the impulse to press her nose against the panel of glass bordering the door. Someday, maybe, she would get this office, or another one like it in the suite, and the same title, but there could be a reason, other than the vagaries of fate, that Steve had gotten the promotion ahead of her. He was happily married to Liam, a pastry chef; the most criminal thing Liam had ever done was to mix one chili too many in the frosting for his "diablo chocolate" cupcakes, which had been Steve's contribution to the office's Christmas potluck. Steve was attracted to good-looking, charming, pastry chefs whose only brushes with the FBI occurred at dance clubs – when he was out on the floor with them. She could learn something about the rules of attraction from him.

"Hey," Pete tugged at her arm, leading her away from their desks, "want to step outside for a breath of fresh air?"

Myka regarded him skeptically. Pete would step outside for a good many things, most of them food-related, but fresh air wasn't one of them. "Come on," he urged her quietly, "little pitchers are full of listening devices."

"That makes no sense," she complained.

"It does at an agency that wiretaps," he hissed.

"Not each other and not at work," she said, but Pete's jaw grew squarer in resolve. Rolling her eyes, Myka gave in. "Okay, let's step outside."

"Outside" was the sidewalk and a street still clogged with traffic and exhaust fumes. There was no fresh air to be found, anywhere. Pete completed a dramatic inhale. "Carbon dioxide. I can't get enough of it." As Myka's glower deepened, he said, "I gave her your number. I gave Helena Wells your number."

"You did what?" Myka felt her heart skip a beat and then beat much, much faster, but it wasn't because, or only because, Pete had given her personal phone number to a woman who couldn't seem to steer clear of securities scams.

"The only one who could've missed the looks you were throwing at each other was your dad – and maybe the kid." He said thoughtfully, "But she seemed a pretty sharp little kid, she sussed out the best place to get cookies at the fair. So I guess it's just your dad that was oblivious." He managed an expression that was both sheepish and defiant; his jaw was still in attack mode while his brown eyes shone with the unswerving devotion of a labrador retriever. "I've tried to fix you up how many times since you and Andi broke up for good, and you showed the most interest in the hot British mom you met at the fair. What's a 'gal's best friend' to do?"

"Ask me first before he gives my number out." Myka gave his shoulder a sisterly cuff. "And before he does something like that, he might want to ask himself if it's a good sign that the hot British mom started freezing up as soon as she learned we work for the FBI." Shrugging to emphasize that it didn't matter to her, Myka said, "Besides, she seemed to be with that guy Nate."

Pete was unconvinced by her display of indifference. "I don't think so. Definitely got the gut impression that Nate was 'friends only' material."

"The only thing that impresses your gut is an all-you-can-eat buffet . . . and, maybe, Kelly Hernandez." Myka couldn't resist the jab. Pete might send her blood pressure to unhealthy levels by his impulsive decisions (such as giving her phone number out to a woman who was likely to become the subject of their next investigation, although, in all fairness, he hadn't known it at the time), but he was also the one to bring it back down. She turned toward their office building, its entrance almost indistinguishable from the entrances to the office buildings on either side of it. Myka had had to learn to tell them apart, not by anything so helpful as an address stenciled on glass or stamped on a plate but by the color and texture of the stone. The building that housed the field office had walls that were a milkier, rougher gray than the others. It had taken her a few days and a few extra walks around the block to note the difference when she had first started with the Bureau, but ever since, she had always cast her eyes up briefly, confirming the color of the stone, before she went through the doors.

Pete tugged at her arm again, and Myka's eyes, which had automatically glanced up at walls that towered so high they seemed to end in a point, impatiently met his. What else hadn't he told her about Helena that he was 'remembering' to tell her now? "Two things you should know before we go back in. First of all, if Kelly dates like she throws a softball, which is totally off-target and hard enough to knock your head off, I'm not going to put myself in that kind of danger. Second of all, the funny business she and Martino are so sure Helena's involved in? The hot British mom isn't part of it. I know it, Mykes, I mean, I _know_ it." He tapped his chest. The sudden seriousness had passed over his face like a cloud and then just as quickly, it was gone. Back was the dopily cocksure grin. "Just like I know she's the one, _the_ one, for you. You can thank me in about," he made a show of checking his watch, "12 months or so, when you ask me to be your best man."

Myka might have been struck by his certainty because he often had an unerring instinct about people, except for the fact that Pete had tried to sell every one of those fix-ups as her chance to meet her soulmate, which would inevitably end in her thanking him by asking him to be her best man. She made a noise that was between a growl and a sigh, and, when she had the opportunity to close the elevator doors on him before he could stick an arm between them, she smirked at him.

Several hours, too many diet sodas, a vending machine sandwich, and a half-package of Twizzlers later, she was willing to concede that he might have a point about Helena Wells. Not about "the one" part, about the not being part of whatever was going on at Amundson Securities. She had read the documents in the file folder that Helena's photo had graced, the emails and memos discussing, albeit cryptically, the accuracy of information provided to investors about certain new energy firms, described as "promising start-ups" even in these internally-circulated documents. She was used to the hyperbole and, depending on the integrity of the firm, outright lies of the marketing materials provided to potential clients, but internal communications were usually more matter of fact about companies they had selected for investment. "Promising" was a little too gauzy. Helena was mentioned as the source of the reports, but there was no claim in any of the documents that she had doctored the information. No explicit claim, perhaps, but the implicit accusation was clear. The names of the authors and the recipients of the emails and memos had been removed from the copies delivered to the district attorney's office, the only name that hadn't been removed was Helena's. It smacked of staging, and Myka recalled Kelly saying that Helena had been named in the second anonymous call. Did their Deep Throat believe that the Amundsons were so tied to Helena or so afraid of an investigation that they would protect her at any cost? Or did he have his own reasons for focusing suspicion on Helena? She had then accessed, through a system-wide database, the case file on Stuart McKnight, and at 7:30 in the evening, she was still wading through its hundreds of pages.

Agents had interviewed Helena early and often. She had had a life before Stuart McKnight, before she shared his bed and gave birth to his child. She had been a sought-after financial analyst in her own right, with an almost intuitive feel for the unpredictability of markets. She had devised models for capturing the volatility of market movements that outperformed all but a few of her competitors'. Their relief when she decided to semi-retire to raise her daughter and to grace McKnight's arm at social galas and charity events had been almost palpable; several had remarked to the agents who interviewed them that "once she took herself out of the field, our investors finally quit coming to us asking 'Why can't you do what 'Wells Financial Management does?'" Myka was having a hard time believing the two Helenas were the same woman; the Helena in a one-of-a-kind designer dress sweeping into the Met bore no relationship to the Helena whom Myka had met at the fair, a distraught mother in a sundress that could have come from Kohl's. One was the wife in all but name of a Wall Street power, the other was a single mom.

She sensed rather than heard Irene's approach. Irene didn't so much sneak up on her staff as materialize in front of them, and Myka enviously wondered if it was an ability that you were granted when you became Special Agent in Charge. Perching on the far end of the workstation's desktop, a casual pose that belied the formality of her skirt suit, Irene looked over the top of her glasses at Myka. No "What are you still doing here?" or "It's time to go home," instead it was "What are your thoughts?" There were times Myka hadn't left the office until after 9:00, and the light in Irene's office was still on. In one of the city's distinguished older neighborhoods, there was a Dr. Frederic, an orthopedic surgeon, who was shooting hoops with his youngest son or tending the roses bordering the porch of their equally carefully tended Victorian as he waited for his wife to come home.

"About what's going on at Amundson Securities or Helena Wells?" Myka wanted to stretch but satisfied herself with rubbing her temple. Even after all these years, it was difficult, no, make that practically impossible, to betray in front of Irene how tired she was. Irene was never less than . . . crisp. And alert. She might be perching, but she was also leaning forward, her eyes questioning, intent.

"Either, both. Whatever you have to give me."

"I have a good chunk of the McKnight case file to get through yet, but there's nothing I've found in it so far to suggest they missed anything about her. Helena seems to have been telling the truth, she didn't know what her boyfriend was up to." Myka should have felt a sense of relief; her instincts weren't all wrong. Despite the fear that had overlaid them, the features of Helena's face had suggested strength, intelligence, and a spark of deviltry, not the narcissism and calculation of a con artist. The latter were what Myka had read in the face of Stuart McKnight. He was a good-looking man, or had been at the time, but his smile was too big, too winning in the photos of him and Helena together. Some might have found the smile dazzling, but Myka had been caught more by the look in McKnight's eyes. There was no friendliness in how those eyes stared at the cameras; there was a glint in them that seemed more than a reflection of the lights. He wanted to be seen in a tux with a beautiful woman at his side; he liked the flashes of dozens of cameras and phone cameras going off, he wanted the attention. How could Helena have not seen that in him? She could see it, and she was looking at a four- or five-year-old photo.

"Humor me. Walk me through how they came to that conclusion."

"Interviews of McKnight's staff, even those who were rolling over on him to get their charges dropped or reduced never claimed that Helena Wells was involved; forensic analyses of the bogus trades, audit logs of the company's computers, none of it shows any evidence that she had been tweaking any programs, whether proprietary or off the shelf, no anomalous access, no spurious IDs." Myka squinted at her notes in the borderline illegible handwriting she had developed to stymie other people's ability to read them. The unfortunate consequence was that sometimes she could barely read them. "There was that algorithm of hers, an equation or formula or whatever you want to call it, that they had found on a lot of the computers. But they couldn't find any proof that it had ever been used, and McKnight kept insisting that it was only a 'prototype.'".

"Makes you wonder what he meant by that, doesn't it?" Irene sardonically observed.

So had the agents interviewing Helena Wells. They were unconvinced by her explanation that McKnight had promised to test its accuracy only on proprietary investments, and they were unmoved by her horror that he might have had plans to blame her "faulty" formula for some of the losses suffered by his clients. Had his multiple offshore bank accounts not been discovered, such a plan might have possibly worked. Yet McKnight had had plenty of opportunities to implicate her, and he never had, so it was possible his calling her algorithm a "prototype" was a rare instance of him telling the truth. "We may never know," Myka said. "He's always maintained that Helena had no involvement, and if her past work for Wells Financial Management is any indication, she's clean. She was never the subject of an investigation by a regulatory agency, federal or state, and people were shocked, actually, when she became involved with McKnight. He was a guy who was rumored to have engaged in some questionable practices; she and her brother had good reputations."

Irene had crossed her arms over her chest and bent her head as Myka summarized her findings, her eyes almost closed as she sorted through the information. " _But_ . . . I can hear you thinking it, Myka. You're wondering how someone so smart, so experienced could be so blind. Don't we see it all the time? Business partners duped by friends they've trusted for years, clients fleeced by financial advisors recommended by their pastors or their neighbors. She had built a life with this man, they were raising a family. We are very good at not listening to what we don't want to hear."

Myka couldn't deny the truth of what Irene said. She had spent the better part of four years with Andi telling herself every time she heard the words "This is it, the break I've been waiting for. It'll mean time apart, but I'll make it up to you, I promise" that it would be the last time, because surely Andi would realize that this bit part was just like all the others. It was a dead end, not another step up to that empyrean height in Andi's imagination from which she could choose her roles at will. Myka had also put her faith in Andi's assurances – when she admitted that the "real break" had turned to be, yes, another dead end – that the latest dead end was the last dead end. The awfulness of the shampoo commercial was surpassed only by the misery of the stitches she had to get when she was bit by a chimp on the set of a sitcom. Until they were both dwarfed by the moment when a director invited her back to his hotel room to discuss her future . . . .Myka understood all too well how you could keep believing in a lover or partner long past the time you should have stopped.

"But," she said impatiently, pushing herself away from her desk with enough force that her chair nearly rolled into the cabinet behind her, "how could she have turned her back on all of it, her company, her work, to consult with the nanny about her daughter's nap times and to lunch with a Z-list celebrity from a reality show?" At Irene's raised eyebrow, Myka said hastily, "Of course I'm not saying that raising a child isn't work or rewarding work, and I might have exaggerated the part about the celebrity, but still," her voice trailed off in frustration.

"But?" Irene pressed.

"She retreated." Myka said it more forcefully than she had intended, and she wiped at her cheek in an abysmal attempt to hide that she was blushing. "Helena moves in with him and she becomes someone else. Why?" She hurriedly followed it with "How did she get a job halfway across the country at Amundson Securities? What's here for her?" She wasn't sure she had really disguised "retreated." It was too personal a word, especially in front of Irene. The hot British mom, as Pete had called her, was no more; the woman with the hint of deviltry in her eyes and smile was the subject of a possible investigation, that was all.

"Do we know what her relationship to the Amundsons is?"

Myka shook her head. "I haven't found a connection yet. They stopped looking into Helena long before McKnight was sent to prison. Technically, the investigation may still be open since some of McKnight's employees have yet to go on trial, but no one's keeping tabs on her."

"Except us, perhaps." More awkwardly than Myka would have predicted, Irene stepped down and away from the desk. She automatically smoothed her skirt. "What information do we have on Amundson Securities and the troubled energy start-ups?"

"Pete's looking into them." When he left the office for the day and she was still buried in files in her cube, he never failed to say that an honest-to-God meal and eight hours of sleep were more useful to the FBI than her being chained to her desk. He had said that tonight as well, on his way to a night of pizza and video games with friends. Especially with the acid from the sodas burning a hole in her stomach lining, she might have left with him if he had been willing to stick around for a few minutes longer. Who was she kidding? He would still be waiting for her, hunched over – and attempting to soothe – his growling stomach in her desperately uncomfortable visitor's chair.

"Ah," Irene said, approval rather than its opposite coloring her voice, "he's wiser than we are, I'm afraid. I'll talk with him tomorrow." As Myka started to swing her chair back around to her monitor, Irene put a delaying hand on the back. "Go home. All of this can wait until tomorrow." The tone was almost maternal, but the eyes were no less intent. Irene might be saying "go home," but her thoughts weren't dwelling on dinner or the opportunity to sit on the porch swing with her husband. "Steve's back tomorrow, and I'd like to talk over with him what our friends from Justice and the DA's office have dropped into our laps. If we decide to recommend an investigation to Washington, I'd want you and Pete to lead it and Steve to oversee it." Irene hesitated in the cubicle's entry. "This is sensitive enough that I want to keep it between the three of us and Steve, at least for now. If it got out that we were investigating one of the Amundsons . . . "

Myka nodded. It wouldn't be a high profile case for the Bureau, necessarily, not like the McKnight investigation, but it would be very high profile for this city. Helena Wells had one hell of a bad angel looking over her shoulder. "Pete's gut is telling him that she's not involved – if there is something going on at Amundson Securities." Myka didn't volunteer opinions this early, her own or anyone else's, but tonight she had done it twice. And when it came to giving readings of Pete's gut, she usually let him do it. She needed to let the case shape her thoughts, not the other way around.

"Possibly or possibly she's cleverer than the rest of us put together." Irene cast a musing look at the institutionally tiled ceiling. If anyone could find an answer to a puzzle hidden in its blandness, it would be Irene. "I wonder if our colleagues left her with the impression that their investigation into her activities remained open. It would be nice to introduce some leverage into a conversation with her, such as a connection, unspecified of course, between Amundson and McKnight. A little something to keep her awake at night." The maternal warmth was gone, though Irene was talking about coercing a woman into cooperating with them with the same smoothness that she might ask after another's health or children. "I'll have to give some thought to the best way of approaching her, if we get authorization to move forward with this. We'll need to use her vulnerability to our advantage."

Inadvertently Myka glanced down at the smiling face in the photo, captured at a happier time in a happier place. If Helena Wells had thought this somewhat sleepy Midwestern city was a refuge, she was about to discover there would be no rest for her. The crazy thought of asking for a reprieve for her caused Myka to look up, almost pleadingly, but Irene was already gone.


	3. Chapter 3

It was Saturday. In her previous lives, Saturday was hardly different from any other day of the week. Before Christina, before Stuart, Helena had treated Saturday, and often Sunday, as workdays, particularly if Charles had been sending her out during the week to charm their clients into reaffirming their commitment to Wells Financial Management. The client meetings and the meetings with the so-called captains of industry whom Charles had identified as prospective clients were distractions from what she considered her real work for the firm, which, in the end, was what kept their clients happy, not her willingness to flatter and banter with them. All that charm and a flirtatious smile would get her without the returns that Wells Financial Management provided would be a lot of unwanted dinner invitations but no promises from their clients that they wouldn't look elsewhere.

Her real work was forecasting movements in the markets and translating those movements into formulas. If the price of Chinese steel skyrocketed or, conversely, plummeted, how would it affect the stock of manufacturers worldwide? More specifically, how much would the price of a share of GM stock go up or down? Anyone seeing her devour foreign news media, business blogs, social media, the _Wall Street Journal_ and other US news outlets, and then page through a presentation given by a professor at the London School of Economic a week ago would find it hard to believe that she was the same woman who had breakfasted that morning with the president of a major waste management firm. The hair that had so silkily spilled over the shoulders of her blazer now stuck out from her head in clumps, betraying her tendency to grab at it in frustration, her blouse bore more than a few coffee stains, and the eyes that had crinkled in amusement at the CEO's joke that "We're big believers in 'garbage in, garbage out'" were red-rimmed and bleary. The nice thing about working on Saturdays and Sundays was that she could work in her bathrobe if she didn't feel like dressing.

When she and Stuart started dating, her work habits didn't immediately change, although she tried not to work in her bathrobe quite as much. But her pregnancy and her decision to leave Wells Financial Management, the latter underwritten, in a sense, by Stuart, gave her the freedom to treat her forecasting and modeling of stock prices as a project rather than as a job. She felt like a grad student again, working when she felt inspired and letting Stuart whisk her away for a few days in Tahoe or Miami when she didn't. (Of course, there had been no Stuart McKnight in grad school. Smoking pot and having sex with her girlfriend or boyfriend of the moment had been her budget version of "getting away from it all.") After Christina was born, the years she had spent assisting Charles in building Wells Financial Management seemed ever more remote, even Giselle seemed less like the siren who had tempted her, for a time, to throw her laptop and the equations on it out the nearest window, than a spoiled – and bad-tempered – daughter of privilege. She began more willingly to accompany Stuart to events, to act as his stand-in at the charity events that he was all too eager to skip; she was becoming Mrs. Stuart McKnight in all but name, and even that, she was beginning to believe, she would accept in time. Helena had never given much thought to having a family, her relationship with her parents had always been distant, and until she discovered that she was pregnant, she had never seriously considered having children. "Family" had always meant school holidays spent with two adults who never seemed to know what to do with her; they had been more at ease with Charles, seven years her senior, so much so that she had concluded early on that she had been an unexpected and unwanted addition. Christina was unexpected, but once Helena had reconciled herself to the pregnancy, she had sworn that her child would never, ever feel unwanted, and Helena filled her days forging a closeness with her daughter that had eluded her and her mother. Her job, her passion was her child. There were no weekends off, every day was a workday.

Christina was still the center of all that she did, but that was the only thing that hadn't changed. With Stuart no longer available to fund a lifestyle that permitted her to play with their daughter in the mornings and take her on strolls and bike rides (secured in a bright yellow trailer) in Central Park in the afternoons, she had had to enroll Christina in daycare as she scrambled for work. The income they had lived on as every asset she and Stuart owned was taken away was a fraction of what she had enjoyed since she had taken her first job as a financial analyst, when she was a very, very bright but very, very young 21-year old, and it was only possible because she had shares in Wells Financial Management to sell. Every day was a work day because when she wasn't depositing Christina at daycare as she looked for a position at a firm that wasn't too frightened by her history to hire her, she was on the dilapidated sofa in their tiny Queens apartment completing assignments that a few old friends and mentors had given her as crumbs to survive on. The position that Nolan Amundson had offered her, which had taken her and her daughter away from that Queens apartment and the cockroaches that had scuttled for cover when she turned on the lights in the kitchen, gave her the stability she needed and, frankly, craved, but it didn't provide much in the way of luxury. There was nothing left over for a personal cook or trainer, no money for housekeeping staff or for a service to pick up and return her dry cleaning. So she had come to treasure her weekends as she had never had to before. Saturdays she spent cleaning the townhouse, doing laundry, ironing, and grocery shopping, if she could squeeze it in. Sundays she grocery shopped if she hadn't been able to get it done on Saturday and she cooked for the week ahead, simple dinners for her and Christina. Sundays were also when she would spend her afternoons coloring with her daughter or playing dolls or letting her romp in the play areas in nearby parks. The outing to the fair a couple of weeks back had been a rare treat, marred, unfortunately, by Christina's brief but panic-inducing disappearance and then by the discovery that her daughter's rescuer was an FBI agent. It would be a long time before they would go to the fair again.

Helena had thrown away the piece of paper with Myka's number on it. Myka's friend had meant well, but she wasn't interested in dating, and if that situation changed, she wouldn't be seeking anyone in law enforcement. She also wouldn't be seeking anyone working at Amundson Securities, which would disappoint Nate. Since their afternoon at the fair, he had been trying to devise a way to ask her to lunch or out for coffee that wouldn't smack of harassment, commenting casually that if she ever wanted a break or to try a new place for lunch, he would be interested in joining her, but she had gently brushed aside his cloaked invitations. A 250-calorie Lean Cuisine was adventurous as she got these days. Her straitened means also didn't allow for a gym membership, so she made do with some early morning yoga and core-strengthening exercises. Lunches out were too expensive for her budget and her waistline.

As she carried another basket of laundry down the stairs to the main floor (a stackable unit was in a closet-sized room off her kitchen and it ran pretty much all day on Saturdays), Helena saw a nondescript sedan park on the other side of the street from her row of townhomes. The back of her neck prickled and she stayed where she was, holding a basket full of Christina's play clothes and pajamas as she waited for the passengers to get out. They might be here to visit the families, predominantly made up of single mothers and their children, in any one of the townhomes, but the car was parked directly across from hers. She didn't know anyone well enough for a co-worker to be dropping by unannounced, not even Nate. If Nolan wanted to see her, he would have called first and, in any event, he would have had her drive out to his home. He wouldn't leave his Prairie School style estate on the northwest edge of the city to drive to her dreary little house. The Amundsons were this state's version of a first family; first, there were no unscheduled visits, and two, there were no visits, only summonses. The FBI had used to arrive like this, without warning, in a dark sedan or SUV. They would double park if they couldn't find space on the street, and though they wore nothing identifying them as FBI, they would almost fall into formation as they walked toward the entrance of the high rise from which she peered down at them. They spared no glance for anyone or anything outside the tight focus of their interest, No smiles at passersby, no casually appraising looks at how the other half lived.

She wasn't surprised when she saw Myka's friend and, more significantly in this context, fellow agent, Pete, shut the driver's side door, although Helena was surprised by the intensity of her dismay when Myka came around from the passenger's side to join him. She hadn't expected to see Myka again, and she especially didn't want to see her now, like this. For those few moments on that Sunday afternoon, they had been equals, even if Helena hadn't been at her best. The easy humor and sureness that Myka had displayed . . . yes, if they had met each other in a different lifetime, before Stuart McKnight had shaken up and then destroyed everything she had known, she would have been interested. But Stuart had happened and Myka was FBI, and nothing positive could develop from that collision. She could regret that other realities didn't exist, but this was the only reality she had, and seeing Pete and Myka walking up to her door, she knew that somehow she had become a suspect once more.

She set her basket at the foot of the stairs. It was warm enough that she had opened the windows and the front door to air out the house, and Pete and Myka waited on the other side of the screen door for her. They were dressed casually, Myka in jeans and a polo shirt, as she had been the day Helena had met her, and Pete in jeans and a deep purple button-down shirt with the cuffs folded back, but their expressions were serious, although Myka attempted a small smile. "I don't suppose this is a special delivery from the Cookie Shack," Helena said dryly, feeling the old stubborn refusal to let anyone, especially anyone sporting a badge, see that she was off-balance. After her first few "conversations" with the various agencies investigating Stuart, she had steeled herself not to give anything away, not in a look, not in a twitch. She hadn't needed an attorney to tell her that; it was self-preservation kicking in, that and a fierce determination to shield Christina from the chaos that Stuart had introduced into their lives.

"No, sorry, the Cookie Shack is closed for the season," Myka said and then blushed, as if she realized that she had spoken too lightly or too literally. Lifting the hair from the back of her neck, the mass of its chestnut-colored waves having been effectively disguised by the baseball cap she had worn that Sunday Helena realized, Myka added in explanation, "We're here to talk to you in a professional capacity."

"Then, by all means, come in," Helena responded, not bothering to soften the mockery of her tone. She unlatched the screen door and stood aside as they entered. "Did I forget to register with your field office when we moved here? Your counterparts in New York didn't inform me that I'd be treated like a sex offender for the rest of my life."

Casting quick, assessing glances at the entryway, the stairs, and the unprepossessing living room to their right, Pete said, "The investigation of you in connection with the Stuart McKnight fraud has never been closed." Helena tried not to draw into herself at his words. "But he's not why we're here."

A scuffling sound at the top of the stairs and a sleepy child's voice asking "Mommy, did Emmie come over to play?" forced Helena to straighten her shoulders and say cheerfully, coaxingly, "No, love, just some people to talk to me. Why don't you go back into your bedroom and finish your nap? Or you can draw me a picture that I'll take to work."

Christina cautiously ventured halfway down the stairs, hand scrubbing at her face. "I want peanut butter and apple," she whined. Her expression brightened as she recognized Myka and Pete. "Cookie lady!" Pointing a finger at Pete, she said almost chidingly, "You're the silly man. You're the cookie monster." She put both hands to her mouth and worked her jaws in a pantomime of Pete's gobbling down cookies.

"She's got you dead to rights, Cookie Monster," Myka murmured.

"What can I say? Ladies any age love me." He cocked his head at Helena. "How about peanut butter and apples all around?" More quietly, he said to her, "It's just a conversation, Helena."

She wasn't going to be charmed or soothed. "That's what they all say – right up to when they start threatening you that the next time you'll see your daughter she'll be graduating from high school." Christina, having negotiated the rest of the steps, sidled next to her, ready, should the situation demand it, to run behind her mother for protection. Poor protection she offered, Helena thought, since she was shorter and decidedly less fit than the agents still standing on the shoe mat. "Why don't we talk in the kitchen as I make Christina her snack? If you don't want peanut butter and apple slices, I have grapes and baby carrots."

"You're not obliged to feed us. A glass of water is more than enough." Myka scowled at Pete.

"Speak for yourself. I haven't had an apple sliced for me since I was a kid," he protested.

Christina hoisted herself onto a chair at the breakfast bar while Myka and Pete sat at the kitchen table in the dining area bordered by the breakfast bar, on one end, and sliding glass doors that opened onto a small patio at the other. Ordinarily Helena wasn't claustrophobic, but the kitchen and dining area seemed even smaller with two extra bodies in it. She took some steadying breaths as she sliced an apple. It was tempting to think about yanking Christina from her chair, flinging open the flimsy screen door, and running out of the house, never to return. She should dash water on that fantasy as soon as possible. "If you're not here to talk to me about Stuart," Helena glanced at her daughter, but Christina didn't react to her father's name, absorbed in the snack preparation, "what do we need to talk about?"

"We'd like to talk about your job at Amundson Securities," Myka said.

Helena fanned the apple slices on a plate and placed it in front of Christina. The fact that they knew where she worked made a farce of her steadying breaths. She had wanted nothing more than anonymity after the painful years of the fraud investigation; she had told Charles and their mother that she was leaving New York for a new job and, she hoped, a new life, but no one else. She suspected that there was hardly anyone at Amundson Securities who didn't know who she was, but there had never been any overt acknowledgment. It would have been akin to pointing out that she had broccoli caught between her teeth or toilet paper stuck to the bottom of her shoe, only much, much worse. Had a co-worker or even one of Nolan Amundson's sons, distressed at the thought that Stuart McKnight's ex-girlfriend was employed at the company, called the FBI? But the FBI wouldn't be paying her a visit because someone had complained that her presence tarnished the Amundson name . . . someone had called the FBI and accused of her a crime.

"Mommy," Christina said, frowning down at her apple slices, "where's the peanut butter?"

"Coming up," Helena said with a brightness that she didn't feel. She took the jar from a cupboard and fumbled for a spoon in the silverware drawer. "I have milk, juice, and sparkling water in the refrigerator." Gesturing toward the much-used teakettle on the stove, she said, "I can also heat up water for tea."

"Chocolate milk?" Pete asked hopefully. Myka rolled her eyes.

"Chocolate syrup. You'll have to make your own chocolate milk." As Pete muttered, "That's too much work," Helena dropped two generous spoonfuls of peanut butter onto Christina's plate. Her daughter chose to coat her finger rather than an apple slice with peanut butter. "I work in the company's IT area. I design custom programs and reports, but since we're a small company, I troubleshoot problems and provide extra batteries and power cords as needed." She stole some apple from Christina's plate and widened her eyes in mock surprise at her daring as Christina shouted in outrage, "Mommy!" But the teasing felt flat with the agents sitting just a few feet away. She lifted a shoulder in Myka's direction. "Saying that I'm back-office operations only probably doesn't give you much comfort."

"I'd love a cup of tea." Myka's look at her gave nothing away, other than a clear signal that their "conversation" might be a long one.

If she and Pete were familiar with the investigation of Stuart McKnight and his company, they would know that it was through the back-office operations that much of the fraud was facilitated. Most of the brokers working for McKnight Investments didn't know that the securities they were peddling were of nonexistent companies. The websites looked professional, and there was always someone young, bright, and seemingly knowledgeable to answer the phone, but try to find the street address, and you would find an abandoned warehouse or a vacant strip mall. Even when the securities were real and packaged into various custom funds, Stuart and his co-conspirators – college buddies intermixed with cronies of Stuart's stepfather, Vincent Crowley, and misanthropic quants whom Stuart had managed to charm – would tweak the returns, the "unpredictable losses" over time outnumbering the gains. When clients complained, Stuart would move their money into more stable investments, and then, once they were assured their capital was growing, he would persuade them to re-invest in what he call his "warrior securities" and "warrior tranches." Helena had heard his pitch at more than one party. "You're not going to make a killing in the market unless you're ready to lay it all on the line. If you're not strong enough to stand the punishment, you're not going to be strong enough to enjoy the reward." Invariably the men to whom he was talking, and he never launched into his warrior spiel if the men didn't outnumber the women in his audience, were between 35 and 60, old enough to feel the encroachment of middle age (receding hairlines, spare tires, marital boredom) but not so old that they didn't give a damn whether the world still saw them as warriors. When it came to manipulating old men, Stuart worked on their fears about their legacy and the value of their estates, marketing the custodial services that McKnight Investments offered. His "back-office guys" would be tasked with designing a new set of false reports, and the trusts' cash and marketable securities would steadily be siphoned off, stashed away in nested LLCs and LLPs that Stuart indirectly owned. It hadn't been enough for him to embezzle from trusts the old men had established for their grandchildren. He had lobbied his clients to donate money to certain charities, a wink and a grin his only suggestion that more benefits might be in store for them than tax breaks. What the wink and the grin didn't suggest was that the charities were as fraudulent as McKnight Investments itself.

Helena decided not to refresh Myka's and Pete's memories. To dwell on how Stuart executed his cons in order to bolster her claim that she couldn't, wouldn't do something similar would only make her look worse. Her knowledge of how he defrauded his clients, no matter that it was after the fact and patchwork, gleaned from what the FBI knowingly and unknowingly disclosed, would lend credence to the belief in many quarters that she had been a part of it and just gotten lucky. On the other hand, for those like her brother, her knowledge only pointed up some fatal flaw within her, a profound gullibility or willed blindness that permitted her to remain ignorant when others "would have suspected _something_ , for Christ's sake." Rarely a day passed when she didn't hear the echo of Charles's jeers. She would wake at the alarm, but the fog of sleep and depression that would otherwise keep her in bed wouldn't be truly banished until she recalled him shouting at her, "How could you be so bloody idiotic? You were supposed to be the gifted one, smarter than all the rest of Wellses put together."

Instead she let the agents lead her question by question, providing responses that were as factual as possible, offering no explanations of or context in which to understand her duties at Amundson Securities unless she was specifically asked. When they asked her about the people she worked with, she limited her descriptions to their names, titles, and job functions. At Nate Phillips's name, Pete's eyebrows shot up and the corner of his mouth curved in a tiny smirk. "Your date at the fair."

"It wasn't a date," Helena said swiftly. "Nate's befriended me and Christina since we moved here. That's all." Pete's smirk seemed permanently fixed and the light in his eyes, both bright and challenging, spoke less to their current conversation and more to the one they had had at the fair, when he had told her that Myka was interested in her and given her Myka's number.

Suddenly both the smirk and glint in his eyes disappeared and he bent over to massage his ankle. "Ow," he said plaintively to Myka, "that was unnecessary."

"So was your comment about Nate." After a sip of her tea, Myka asked Helena, "It sounds like you have a good relationship with him. Do you have similar responsibilities?"

"Do you mean, are we colluding together on whatever nefarious things I'm supposed to be doing?" As her sarcastic reply hung in the air between them, Helena saw Myka's eyes narrow in irritation. "Nate's job is to keep our systems running. He's all IT; he has no background in finance." Leaning across the table, she said with emphasis, "And not a dishonest bone in his body." She picked up her virtually untasted mug of tea and drank it down, her eyes not dropping from Myka's. "I could help you more if you told me what I've been accused of. That's why you're here, isn't it? Somebody's told you that I'm picking up where Stuart left off." She looked away from Myka, forcing herself to see the kitchen as they must see it: the low-end appliances, the cheap cabinetry, the dirty dishes from breakfast. Her circumstances were reduced, but they would get better. It was as Nolan had told her when he offered her the job at Amundson Securities. "It's beneath your talents, but it's a base you can build on." Rebuild on might be more accurate, but this home, the routines she and Christina had established, they were her new Stuart-less foundation. Christina was upstairs in her room, which wouldn't qualify as a walk-in closet in the penthouse in which they had once lived, drawing pictures for the three of them. It wasn't much, what they had now, but she would protect it.

"Are there 'nefarious things' going on at Amundson Securities?" Myka's flash of irritation had passed, and Helena sensed in her, as she had that day at the fair, a responsiveness, a generosity of spirit that made her want to trust her. Myka wasn't the kind of FBI agent who would come in with guns blazing; she would want to do what they were doing now, talking over the situation. She seemed willing to listen, she gave the impression that she could be fair; the problem was those weren't the qualities that Helena had learned to associate with the FBI. The investigation of Stuart McKnight and his business interests had taken months and the agents had changed over time, some being reassigned, others leaving the FBI, but each and every one of them had assumed she was guilty. It had taken years, notwithstanding the lack of evidence, before they decided not to charge her, and as Pete had cockily reminded her, they hadn't closed the investigation. In fact, the agents in the New York office would likely reexamine everything from Stuart's case in light of whatever Myka and Pete thought they had on her now. No, Myka might be a nice FBI agent, but she was still an FBI agent.

"You seem to think there are," Helena parried. She rapidly tried to recall all the scuttlebutt and office gossip she generally ignored – about investments going sour, brokers going crazy, and clients going to court. Nothing came to mind, which should be a lesson to her not to pass up break-room or cube-row conversations for the quiet and relative privacy of her desk. Rumor and speculation were as much the lifeblood of the work as FOMC meetings and earnings releases. Amundson Securities wasn't a big firm or one that prided itself on financial innovation. With the exception of certain very wealthy, very influential clients, mainly Nolan's friends and business associates, the firm catered to the mid-range professional, successful but not Bill Gates- or Jeff Bezos-successful. Amundson Securities' clients were typically looking to grow their nest eggs, not lose them in a high-flying venture. The firm did provide more speculative opportunities for select clients with capital to spare, offering complex investment products and promising, if risky, start-ups in need of investors. Sometimes the complex investment products and start-ups failed spectacularly. She had seen it first hand in the reports she designed comparing the profitability and ROEs of the firm's pet alternative energy start-ups with energy sector funds, a custom portfolio of energy companies, and other start-ups with similar profiles. Investing in energy companies was always a high-risk enterprise, and alternative energy start-ups even more so. There had been no method of massaging the data to make Amundson's start-ups look better, not one that wouldn't lead the firm into some very gray areas.

"Is it about the failed energy start-ups?" She couldn't believe she had blurted it out and stared at her empty mug in shock. There had been some grim faces when news of the bankruptcy filings had begun circulating among staff, and Scott Amundson, Nolan's youngest son and president of the firm, had spent much of one day in his office with the door closed, trying to console angry investors over the phone. Or so Helena had supposed as she passed outside his door. She remembered similarly painful conversations with unhappy investors when she had been at Wells Financial Management. Even though the reports she had put together had clearly shown the deterioration in the companies' financials, some investors assumed a level of outrage completely out of proportion to their shrewdness – and the reiterated explanations of risk. They would bluster at her that they had been misled, that she and Charles had perpetrated a fraud; she had learned over time to let them vent, reminding them only when they had spent themselves that they had been warned, repeatedly, that the investments were high risk and that the financial information they had been provided had disguised nothing. Eventually they would forget how angry they had been and, within a short amount of time, sometimes just a day or two, they would be back, asking her to find them another diamond in the rough. But why would an enraged investor associate her with the start-ups' failures? She didn't interact directly with the clients, and it wasn't broadly known, outside the firm, that Nolan had hired Stuart McKnight's former girlfriend.

She couldn't endure the scrutiny and suspicion again, the endless so-called interviews, the endless revisiting of every, _every_ aspect of her and Stuart's life together, especially the aspects she had known nothing about. ("Did you know that he was making monthly payments to the mother of his other daughter? Cute little thing, just turned eight. He has a son, too. Senior in college. Mother's his high school sweetheart.") Whereas before she hadn't wanted to give Myka and Pete more than what they had asked for, she had the opposite impulse now. If she told them everything they wanted to hear, even if she had to invent it, would they finally leave her alone? Perhaps in an alternate reality in which you really were innocent until proven guilty. But they were here because someone had whispered her name in their ears, her name and the suggestion of questionable financial dealings at an investment firm. Of course she could endure the scrutiny and suspicion again; it was better than prison. None of it was as intolerable as the possibility of losing her daughter.

She lifted her eyes and smiled, albeit wanly, at them, gesturing toward Myka's mug. "More tea?"

Once more she let the agents lead her question by question. Yes, she had created reports for the brokers, the officers, the board of directors on the performance of the start-ups, as well as other investments. Yes, there had been concern at the firm about their poor performance; they had begun to hemorrhage money, running through their capital at an alarming rate. Sales contracts had fallen through, cost-saving technologies hadn't developed as anticipated, borrowing costs had increased. Demands for more information from them had gone unanswered. Their failures wouldn't be a large financial loss for the firm – it hadn't invested its own money in the companies – but Nolan's friends and associates would lose money. The reputational cost to the firm could be high, but the money that had been invested and lost, the potential hit to the Amundson "brand," those weren't her concerns. She took the data her management gave her and found the data they were seeking, and she combined it, calculated it, and presented it in bright, colorful reports with lots of visuals, bar graphs, line graphs, pie charts. Explanatory text was sparse and no more than a few sentences. Let the numbers do the talking was the adage.

"We have information that suggests you did more than populate a spreadsheet with financial data." Frowning, Myka dug at her forehead to smooth out the worry lines. "It suggests that you may have conspired with others at Amundson Securities to present a misleading picture to investors."

"I'm surprised that your informant hasn't suggested that I took a page from Stuart's book and created the start-ups out of thin air. It's amazing how a little money well spent can get you millions in return. That's one thing I learned from him – never do a con on the cheap." Helena leaned back in her chair and circled her arm to encompass the kitchen and dining area. "Look at this and tell me I have the funds to seed a good con." Despite her intention not to show how frightened and angry she was, bitterness crept into her voice. "I have less than a thousand dollars in my savings account and only slightly more than that in my Amundson Securities' 401(k). I'd probably have to take out a loan for a major car repair."

"You have to admit that you're more than back-office support. My brother-in-law is in IT, and he doesn't do the kind of specialized reports you've talked about. You have the skills and the knowledge to distort the data, Helena, not just present it," Myka said in gentle rebuttal.

"But not the desire. Do I miss my old life? Of course I miss putting a thousand dollar pair of shoes on my credit card and taking spur-of-the-moment trips to Belize and Cancun." She laughed to blunt the sting. "I miss people looking at me and not seeing a criminal. But as much as I miss all of that, I love my daughter more."

"Then help us, work with us."

Later, as Helena saw Myka and Pete out the door, each with a Christina Wells's original in hand (Myka's a rendering of the Cookie Shack that inexplicably had a chimney and smoke issuing from it and Pete's a plate of cookies bordered by tulips), she wasn't sure what she had agreed to or if there were any sort of arrangement in place. Pete's vague references to "looping in our bosses" and "getting it squared away" told her nothing. Myka had been more noncommittal, saying only that they would be in touch. On her part, Helena reflected as she picked up the laundry basket from the foot of the stairs and carried it to the washer and dryer, she had said only that she would find out what she could on the start-ups, who, specifically, the investors were, how much each of them had lost, and whether any of them had threatened to bring action against the firm. She had wanted to emphasize that digging for information carried its own risks. To get it, she would have to emerge from her work burrow, initiating conversations with co-workers with whom she rarely exchanged more that "Good morning" or "Have a good evening" and joining, or at least listening in on, the break room and coffee-break gossip she preferred to avoid.

It would make her more noticeable at the firm, chatting, asking questions about things that, in terms of her job duties, weren't any of her business, which was what she dreaded most. While she couldn't pretend that her co-workers didn't know who she was, she didn't want to provide occasions for having to acknowledge it. She didn't want to suffer their curiosity, freed to be openly expressed, about her former life. Having had a high profile, she was content with her virtually nonexistent one, and trying to draw out information could start raising questions about her. There were more discreet ways, more covert ways, of finding that information. She had access to the final versions of the reports she had created on the start-ups that went to senior management and the board, and, if she were careful, she could access the reports and communications sent to the clients. But she would need to be careful, audit logs were reviewed by the firm and by the corporate IT staff who had overarching responsibility for systems and information security at all the Amundson companies. She didn't want to lose her job trying to prove that she shouldn't lose it.

Taking the empty basket upstairs for another load of dirty laundry, Helena glanced into the living room, making sure that Christina was still engaged with her _Frozen_ Lego set and not, say, rearranging the furniture into a fort. She hadn't needed much help putting it together, and though she seemed content to invent stories for the figures and the assorted dolls and plush animals from her bedroom that she had included as secondary characters, Helena made a note to herself to look for a more advanced (but reasonably priced) Lego set soon. Christina had enjoyed figuring out how the bricks interlocked, grasping the order without having to refer to the illustrations in the instructions or her mother's supposedly greater expertise. She was an interesting mix of little girl and civil engineer. She could shift from pleading to keep a pony in her bedroom to logically stating the case for why the moon couldn't be made of cheese (it would melt under the sun's rays, it would crumble) before completely reverting back to being a five-year-old and claiming that if the moon were made out of cheese, it would be too stinky this close to Earth. Calling out to her, Christina asked, "Can we still ride bikes today?" Then she leveled a child's greatest weapon. "You promised."

"After I get this load in." Sometimes before dinner on Saturdays, Helena would take her on a circuit around the townhome development. The purple bike with tassels and a basket, and training wheels, had been Christina's birthday present in July, and she could already work up a good head of steam, bent over the handlebars, legs churning. Helena foresaw wheelies and jumps by the time Christina turned six. She wanted to see that – not the daredevil acrobatics – but Christina riding her bike without training wheels, riding with her friends, already impatient to turn seven. She didn't want to start worrying that by next summer she would be facing a trial or worse.

She stripped the sheets from Christina's bed, then she went into her bedroom to take the sheets off her bed. Her one luxury buy for herself, a queen-sized bed with "advanced memory foam technology" or whatever the salesperson had called it. She would reserve one area of her life in which she could completely relax, put her anxieties about her and Christina's future aside, so her bed bloody well needed to be comfortable. As she smoothed out the mattress cover, Myka's face popped unbidden into her mind, the green eyes looking intently at her, no, into her as she had seemed almost to be pleading, "Then help us, work with us." Helena had wondered, for a dizzying moment, if Myka had felt every burst of rage, every spike of fear that she had tried to hide during their . . . conversation. Not just sensed but sensed and understood, that look telling her, I know it's awful, but we'll get through it. This was madness. She and Myka weren't psychically connected, and she definitely didn't need to be thinking about Myka anywhere near a bed. She picked up the basket and marched downstairs with it.

Christina asked hopefully from the living room, "Is it time for bikes yet?"

"I haven't put the load in, love."

"I like her," Christina said with a child's blithe indulgence in nonsequitors. She got up and followed Helena down the hall. "I'm glad I found her at the fair."

"I'm glad you found her too," Helena said dryly, opening the lid to the washer. Christina stood on tiptoe trying to peer in.

"Maybe she can ride bikes with us sometime."

"Maybe."

"Maybe she'll bring cookies."

"Maybe." Helena started the washer and tossed in a Tide pod. She reluctantly left her own bedsheets in the basket as she stuffed Christina's into the washer tub. She would have another load to do once they came back from their ride. Dinner tonight would be one of the frozen pizzas in the freezer – and wine. "Go get your jacket," she said, forcing enthusiasm into her voice, and Christina spun around to race to the coat closet.

Before she and Pete had left, Myka had said, much too casually, "Remind me how you got the job at Amundson Securities."

Funny choice, "remind," because Helena had never told them how she had ended up at the firm. Also a funny choice because she doubted that Myka needed to be reminded of anything. "Nolan Amundson is a family friend. He'd been in contact with my mother during the investigation and offered to help any way he could." It was true, the family friend part, the part about his being in contact with her mother, but she hadn't included the parts that were also true, that, until her relationship with Stuart had become newsworthy, he hadn't spoken to a member of the Wells family in years, that her mother disliked him with an intensity the otherwise glacially cool Cynthia Wells reserved for displays of affection, the public spotlight, and, Helena often thought, her own daughter, that her mother hadn't told her of Nolan's willingness to help until she had sold the last of her stock in Wells Financial Management to Charles. Her mother had given birth to two children, but only one was the child of her heart.

Myka needed to know none of the oedipal drama of her family. She had given Myka what she requested, nothing more, nothing less. Yet there was that look, that calm, thoughtful, patient look, as if Myka were willing to listen to all that she hadn't said, listen and not judge. Eventually Myka glanced away, turning her head toward Pete but not before observing, "Serendipitous, wasn't it? Stepping in and offering you a new start exactly when you needed one."

Myka didn't need reminding and casual wasn't her default mode. She would always mean what she said because she took care about what she said and how she said it. Helena doubted that there was anything she didn't put care into, except, possibly, her hair. It was a glorious mess, that hair, and it was likely the only thing that Myka let escape her attention. The offer to come work at Amundson Securities and, little more than six months later, the whispers of suspicion, or what amounted to the same (or worse) that the FBI had in their possession about fraudulent activity at the firm was some interesting timing that wouldn't have escaped Myka's notice. Helena didn't want to think it, but it was there – that the two events weren't a coincidence, that Nolan had had a motive other than a desire to help out the daughter of an old friend. What better way to cover illegal dealings at one of your companies than to hire a woman on whom they could be so easily blamed? He would be accused of bad judgment or senility. There might be rumblings that he should step down as chairman, not only of Amundson Securities but of all his companies. The bad press, the demand for a public apology, the questioning of his capacity, the unflattering light shown on the Amundson name, all of it was better than going to jail. She knew that better than anyone.

He had thrown her a life preserver, or so she had thought, but what did she really know about him? She had been to his home only once, a few days after she had arrived in the city. He had invited her to his home, and she and Christina had had lunch with him, not in the formal dining room, which looked like it could easily seat 20, but in a nook of the kitchen that looked out over a terrace covered in snow. Lunch had been spaghetti and meatballs with chocolate pudding for dessert, a menu sure to please a child, but the meal had been skillfully prepared, attesting to the presence of someone besides the old man, dressed in wool slacks and a flannel shirt, who had minutely adjusted the placement of their silverware with trembling fingers. He hadn't looked the part of the patriarch of the state's first family or the entrepreneur who had taken the family business, which had made its money in lumber and mining, and transformed it into one of the largest privately held organizations in the country. He looked like the old men in the Perkins she and Christina had eaten in the night before; they had folded their newspapers into ever smaller squares as they read them and fussed at the waitresses who stopped at their tables to refill their coffee mugs. To be fair, she probably wasn't what he had expected either, cadaverously thin with a defeated droop to her features, hardly the fashion plate that the more tabloid-oriented social media had routinely excavated from photo archives and posted online.

Nolan had been charmed by Christina, and she had been at her lively but well-behaved best, offering her first impressions of her new home and the state's notorious winters and turning puppy-dog eyes on Helena when she expressed the hope that Mommy would take her sledding sometime soon. Nolan had pointed to the snow-covered terrace outside the French doors, telling her that she could visit him and they would build snowmen and slide down the hills. When Christina said that she couldn't see any hills, he had chuckled and replied that there were hills farther out on the property. "I have lots of land, Christina, and there are lots of hills."

And there it was, in his chuckle, his exchange of amused glances with Helena. His authority had gone unchallenged for so long that he no longer felt the need to assert it. He wore it like he wore his flannel shirt, comfortably. She had encountered old lions like him in her years building Wells Financial Management with Charles, old men in their seventies and eighties who had accumulated enough wealth, pirated was closer to the truth, to last their descendants for generations. They took a perverse pride in their anonymity. Meet them on Fifth Avenue and you might think they were granddads from upstate, taking a day in the city to show their grandchildren the Met. Helena imagined that most people maneuvering their carts around Nolan's in a grocery store wouldn't give this tall, reedy man, stooped and cautious in his gait, a second look. Yet many of the items in their carts would have been grown, processed, packaged, and shipped by the companies he owned.

There had been no afternoon of sledding on Nolan's property. She and Christina had never been invited back. Helena didn't take offense. He had given her more than a job; he had given her an opportunity to reclaim her life. He had done his duty by an old friend, if he had seen it as that, who had been dead for almost 20 years. Helena had been an 18-year-old finishing her junior year at uni when her father suffered a massive heart attack on a business trip. She hadn't known who Nolan Amundson was, had never heard his name, and he hadn't attended her father's funeral. All the more remarkable then that he would risk his reputation by offering her a job. Helena hadn't been able to figure out his interest in her. She encountered him at Amundson Securities on occasion, usually when he was attending a board meeting. He was always pleased to see her, asking after Christina. Their conversations were brief, but she would leave him at the door of the boardroom convinced that he wanted to say more than he had. Though she had never turned around to confirm it, she was certain that he watched her until she disappeared from view. It wasn't a sexual interest that she sensed, but it had a similar hopeful, seeking quality.

Having had the FBI show up on her doorstep, she thought she better understood the nature of his interest. When she had asked him during the lunch why, if he had wanted to offer her a job, he hadn't chosen one of his other companies, he had grinned at her skepticism. "I can weather a little bad press, if that's what happens. I did my due diligence, and I know you're one of the best analysts out there. I'm betting that it won't be too long before you've gotten your confidence back, and you and Scott will be running the place together." His grin faded, and his eyes, which were as dark as hers and a hundred times harder to read, grew piercing. "This isn't charity, Helena. If I didn't think you would make me money, you wouldn't be here." Her stomach lurched at the memory, and she put a hand to the wall to steady herself. Old lions like him didn't live to be old by acting selflessly. He wanted her at Amundson Securities for reasons of his own, not necessarily the ones he had told her.

"Mommy!" Christina shouted. "Where are you? I've been waiting forever. Let's go!" She stomped into the kitchen and down the hall, glowering at her. Helena sighed and closed the door to the utility closet. Christina had already flung open the door to the garage, and Helena could tell by the rattle and clash of metal that she was trying to move her bike. Flicking on the light, she saw that Christina had pulled her bike away from the wall and was guiding it toward the driveway with one hand as she tried to put on her helmet with the other. She winced as the bike careened into the side of the car. Her bike, considerably older and more battered than her daughter's, remained only perilously tilted against the wall thanks to Christina's impatient efforts to free hers. "Let's go," Christina said again, righting her bike. Here was another lion, a cub in jacket and helmet, just learning how to roar.


	4. Chapter 4

I coulda been a contender. This office coulda been mine. Myka smiled to herself. Her Marlon Brando imitation was crap, but at least no one heard her. However, Steve chose that moment to look at her with his very clear, very blue eyes, and Myka felt the glance penetrate to the movie room in her mind in which, like Brando's Terry Molloy, she brooded over what might have been. Pete called the look "Blue Justice"; Steve's eyes deserved to be on a movie poster staring down a gangster or, more prosaically, surveying with pride the Assistant Special Agent in Charge's office. Yet those eyes were looking at her, the interrogative wrinkling of the brows above them marring the perfection of Blue Justice.

Naturally he would want to know why she and Pete had let two weeks go by without following up their conversation with Helena. "I'm meeting with her this afternoon. I'm hoping she'll have something for us. If nothing solid, then at least a clue, a suggestion, something we can work from our end." What she didn't tell Steve was how brusque and impatient Helena had sounded when she called, with a growl to her voice that reminded Myka of her father. Helena had offered no apology for the two-week silence, saying only that she normally took her lunch at one and could meet then. Pete had joked that they didn't to flip a coin to see which of them would be her lunch date, because his vibes were telling him Myka should be the one to go.

Myka usually trusted his vibes, but she wasn't convinced that they were particularly sensitive to the status of her love life. They appeared to be most active – and accurate – about the direction of investigations, leading Pete to recommend a course on the basis of "my gut says yes" or "my gut says no," and the nearest source of food. It was no coincidence that his vibes were strongest when a lead they were pursuing brought them within sight of a Taco Bell or McDonald's. A 1:00 meeting fell within Pete's lunch hour; no wonder his gut was urging him to stay in the office, close to his mini-cooler of triple-decker sandwiches, Doritos, and Mountain Dew, while she tried to persuade a resistant Helena Wells to work with them.

Pete turned to her, his mouth full of mini-muffins that Steve had brought to the office, courtesy of Liam. "What do you think?" he garbled.

Myka didn't normally let herself get distracted, but she was developing a bad habit of getting distracted when Helena Wells was the subject. They were meeting about her, and Myka still couldn't focus for thoughts of the dark eyes that, when they were unguarded, had a warmth to them that she wanted to wrap around her like a robe, but Helena's eyes were unguarded only when they were gazing at Christina. When they gazed at her, they seemed more discs than eyes, black, flat, and hard. The voice, too, was different when Helena was teasing her daughter, a world away from the caustic burn it could carry if she were responding to an agent's question. Through her fog, Myka was dimly aware that Steve had asked another question, and she had to clear her head of the hope that someday she might hear that voice soften and say her name like it wasn't something bad that had to be spit out. "Do I think she can be believed or do I think she can help us?" Myka hazarded. In her mind, they were two separate questions. Even if Helena were innocent of the accusations, it didn't mean that she would willing to help them, and if she were guilty, she might make of the FBI's otherwise unpleasant intrusion into her life an opportunity to direct its suspicion elsewhere.

"I think she can be believed," Myka said slowly, "but she'll be a reluctant partner at best. Working with us takes her back to when she and McKnight were being investigated." Without thinking she stole a mini-muffin from the paper plate that Pete was holding close to his chest. "When we showed up on Saturday, she was doing the laundry, and her daughter was playing in the living room, just normal weekend stuff, and when she saw us . . . she saw it all shattering. Normal's a gift to someone who's gone through what she has, and we took it away from her."

Pete gravely looked down at the plate and the gap left where Myka had taken the muffin. "My gut tells me Helena Wells isn't behind what's going on at Amundson Securities – and that it's missing a muffin," he finished darkly, mock glaring at Myka. "But my selfish partner is right, she'll be cooperative only when she has to be. She hates the FBI, and I'm pretty sure she Cloroxed the house after we left."

"Working with you two can't be worse than prison time." Steve pushed aside the Tupperware container in which only a few mini-muffins rolled around, their edges a little worried, as if Pete had already nibbled at them, to open the folder underneath. He meditatively tapped the photocopies of the emails that District Attorney Kosan had anonymously received. "Someone's going to some trouble to convince us that Helena Wells is up to her ex-boyfriend's tricks, and maybe our whistleblower is right." He gave an ironic nod to Pete. "Your gut," then he gave an identical nod to Myka, "and Norman Rockwell Saturday afternoons at home notwithstanding."

"Got it. Make sure we exercise some healthy skepticism." Myka hesitated. "The thing I keep tripping over isn't her, but him, Nolan Amundson. Why bring her all the way out here? He has offices on the East Coast, the West Coast, everywhere. She has no family, no friends, no support here. He's helping out the daughter of an old friend, but he couldn't have found a job for her in New York?"

"Maybe she wanted the hell out of New York. Maybe she wanted to go where no one knew her," Pete countered, slurping at a quart-sized travel mug filled with Mountain Dew. "Her brother practically disowned her, and her friends acted like they had never met her. She probably jumped at the chance for a fresh start."

"And this would be her destination of choice?" Myka said dryly. "I love it, it's my home, but the Frozen North isn't for everyone. But putting aside the question of why he brought her more than a thousand miles from her home, why Amundson Securities? His corporate headquarters is only a couple of blocks away, and he puts her, a woman connected to one of the biggest securities frauds we've ever seen, in his securities firm?"

"He may look like a kindly old man, the unofficial state grandpa, but he wasn't always like that." Irene was leaning against the doorframe, her skirt suit an autumn mélange of brown, deep red, and gold. The casual pose was deceptive; Myka had seen Irene perch on a desktop – her desktop – only to announce that they were going on a raid in the next five minutes. "When the Amundson empire hit hard times in the '70s, Nolan didn't scruple about the means he used to keep it solvent. He ousted his uncle, Magnus Amundson, who was CEO at the time, he slashed costs and closed factories, and he got involved in some questionable, but ultimately profitable, business ventures. We investigated him because there was evidence he was partnering with the Mob."

Pete stared at her incredulously. "Nolan Amundson? The Mob? Next you're gonna tell me he was the one behind Jimmy Hoffa's disappearance."

Irene disapprovingly clicked her tongue. "Rein in your imagination, Agent Lattimer. We couldn't prove anything, not definitively, but his CFO and the company's internal auditor went to prison for fraud, and a lot of us thought they took the fall for Nolan."

"Were you one of them?" Myka asked.

"I was too junior to have an opinion, at least one worth listening to," Irene said wryly, "but it was an invaluable experience. I learned that even the most upright businessmen will cut corners if they think they can get away with it and that people will stop at very little to avoid going to prison." She looked intently at Myka. "Nolan Amundson didn't give Helena Wells a job at his securities firm because he felt sorry for her. He thought there was something in it for him. You need to figure out it was." She paused before saying with emphasis, "Discreetly." Her glance flicked to Steve. "Call with the assistant director in my office in five."

Myka couldn't suppress the spurt of envy. In five, Steve would be in Irene's office talking with one of the Bureau's bigwigs. In five, she would be back at her desk, trying to call up old files on Nolan Amundson from the archives. Maybe this investigation would be her break, what would bump her up to an Assistant Special Agent in Charge like Steve, possibly a Special Agent in Charge of her own field office. She could hope, couldn't she? And work harder than hell to make it happen. No more being distracted by thoughts of Helena Wells's enigmatic dark eyes and melancholy air. Helena Wells was only a means to an end, she told herself firmly.

"Let's have another chat after you've met with Helena, Myka." Steve was about to put the lid over the Tupperware container when Pete reached into it to scoop up the remaining mini-muffins. "Liam thought he had made enough for the office," Steve said plaintively.

"Hey, I'm saving you the embarrassment of bringing home leftovers. Liam will know that his treats were appreciated."

Myka rolled her eyes. "Because if everyone else in the office saw them, they'd be making the sign of the cross and screaming 'God save us from the muffins!'"

"It's why I joined the FBI." Pete grinned unrepentantly. "I'm selfless like that."

Myka did, in fact, spend the rest of the morning trying to pull up the Bureau's old files on Nolan Amundson, and when that promised to take the rest of her life, digitization making files harder, paradoxically, to retrieve, as if there were still a fussy librarian whom she had to placate, she turned to other sources. It was slow work and necessarily partial, and she was readier for a break than she had anticipated when it was time to meet Helena. Amundson Securities was on the opposite side of the river that bisected the city's downtown, which sounded farther away than it actually was. She could take one of the streetcars that plied the downtown and save herself the aggravation of trying to find herself a parking spot. It was a warm day for late September, and she enjoyed the breeze through the streetcar's open windows, even though it smelled of asphalt and traffic and the unwashed-socks funkiness that seemed characteristic of all large cities. She didn't want to breathe it in too deeply, but at least the air had character, unlike the filtered air of the office.

This part of the downtown used to be lined with wharves back when the river had been the city's main commercial thoroughfare. Her great-great-grandfather Bering, after leaving Hamburg for the Great Plains, had gotten his start loading and unloading the barges that transported grain and flour south and delivered tobacco and cotton north. Barges were rarer these days, although if you hung over the railing of one of the bridges that spanned the river for long enough, you could usually spot one slowly negotiating a course upstream or downstream. Many of the warehouses had been torn down as shipping moved inland, from barges to fleets of trucks, and distribution centers the size of football stadiums ate up farmland south of the city. The old warehouses that had been spared, their preservation owed to their historical or architectural interest, had been converted into offices and lofts, and Amundson Securities rented space in one of them.

Helena, however, hadn't wanted to meet her at the firm, suggesting, instead, a Panera a few blocks away, and Myka caught only a glimpse of the warehouse in which Amundson Securities had its offices before the streetcar trundled through the intersection. She watched what would have been her stop disappear behind her, and she regretted missing an opportunity to see Helena's workplace as a visitor, a friend dropping in to pick her up. She might have sensed something of its dynamics in just those few minutes. Barging in with a badge and a subpoena fatally disrupted the meshing of personalities and processes that made each workplace unique and could help to explain why a fraud could go on so long without being detected or, conversely, why so many would conspire to hide it. What she knew of Amundson Securities would inevitably be distorted by what Helena chose to tell her, not from a desire to deceive necessarily, but because people instinctively edited what they experienced into a narrative that made sense to them. Yet because it was Helena who was acting as her eyes and ears, Myka knew she couldn't dismiss the possibility that Helena's account would be deliberately skewed. It would have been really nice if she could have shown up at the reception desk and been led to Helena's office or, better yet, had a finger pointed in the general direction and allowed to find her own way there.

The disappointment fled when she entered the Panera and saw Helena just inside the foyer, awkwardly stepping aside to let the serious customers get a better look at the menus overhead. She was wearing a skirt and short-sleeved top, standard office wear for this last gasp of summer weather, but the skirt hugged her butt and showed off shapely calves while the top, a deep rose, accentuated the contrast between her complexion, which seemed too fragile even for a September sun, and the glossy fall of dark hair. She was a walking or, in this case, standing Neapolitan, and Myka had always enjoyed taking a bite of chocolate ice cream while the spoonful of strawberry was still dissolving in her mouth. She shook her head. At best, Helena was an informant; at worst, she was the suspect they would eventually arrest. What she wasn't, at all, was material for fantasies.

The lukewarm smile of greeting that Helena gave her only seconded the self-admonition. As they joined the line at the counter, Helena asked quietly, "Are you open to getting our food to go and walking down to the river? A meeting ran late, and I've already spotted a co-worker at one of the tables."

Myka didn't think it was time yet for secret meetings in hotel parking lots or in unmarked cars, but it didn't hurt to be careful. "Sure. It's a nice day and there are plenty of benches near the river."

She tried to fill their walk back toward the river with small talk about Christina and whether she was enjoying the start of the schoolyear, not-to-miss autumn highlights, the weather, the sports teams. Helena's responses were brief, the shuttered look in her eyes telling Myka even more plainly than the coolness in her voice that she was here under duress and that Myka's attempts to engage her in casual conversation were doomed to fail. As Myka neared the end of her less than plentiful stock of conversation starters – Pete was so much better at this, she concluded for the hundredth time – she spied the back of an unoccupied bench and decided they could walk the short distance to it in silence.

"You're different than the other agents I've met," Helena said abruptly. "They always belonged to one of three groups, the agents who thought I was as guilty as hell, the agents who also thought I was as guilty as hell but hoped if they treated me like a human being I might roll over on Stuart, and the agents who were so busy collecting the evidence and nailing down the case they didn't see me at all, except as a piece of furniture they had to push aside. You don't hate me, and despite your clumsy efforts at chatting with me, I don't think you're trying to make me your friend."

Myka stopped. "You're not a piece of furniture that's in my way." She took a deeper breath than she had intended, uncertain about what it would suggest to Helena. "We need your help to figure out what's going on at Amundson Securities, but I'm not going to pretend that working together makes us friends or puts us on the same side. I hope it doesn't happen, but our partnership may not end happily."

"You may end up arresting me, after all?" Helena laughed humorlessly. "I appreciate the honesty." She tipped her head at the bench. "Shall we sit down?"

Myka ran her hand over the slats, dislodging twigs and leaves that had fallen from the shade trees nearby. Some of the leaves fluttering to the ground were yellow, and she realized with a sense of wistfulness that summer was over, and she had watched it pass through office windows. Helena had already sat down, taking her sandwich from her bag. She kept only half of it out, carefully rewrapping the remaining half and putting it back in the bag. Myka wondered if she were saving it for later in the day or tomorrow's lunch, and, remembering Helena's townhome and the laundry basket at the foot of the stairs, the signs that she and Pete had an interrupted an afternoon's chores, she wanted to ask Helena how often she let herself recall that she had once had household staff to wash her clothes and cook her meals.

"The reports that went out to the investors, they were altered," Helena flatly said.

Jaws beginning to work on her own sandwich, Myka stopped their motion, surprised, not by what Helena said, but by how she continued to be distracted, even though Helena was mere inches from her. She had hoped that her inability to focus during the morning meeting with Steve and Pete would be a one-time event once she saw Helena again. Nothing like a wary, suspicious, unwilling informant to send any daydreams about a "hot British mom" (Pete's words) flying. Yet Helena wasn't thinking about her lunch companion's wardrobe or wondering about that companion's previous life. She was ready to get this lunch over with, and the quickest way of doing it was giving the special agent next to her the information she wanted. Although the sun shone no less brightly, Myka was convinced a cloud had crossed it at the word "altered."

"I collect the data, I analyze it, and then I make it look pretty." Helena took a sip of her iced tea, her gaze directed at the river. They sat too far away to get a full view, but Myka could see the swirling current at the midpoint and the lazier eddies at the opposite bank. "I create interactive charts and graphs in bright colors, and," Helena said wryly, "summarize, in no more than two sentences, what the charts and graphs mean. 'Your EPS is twice what it was last month.'" She screwed her mouth into a falsely bright smile. The smile fading, she said, "I save the reports on a shared drive so the portfolio managers and financial planners can review them. They're supposed to ask me to make any changes, but they have the ability to make changes themselves, and sometimes they do. It's an unwritten rule, however, that they're not supposed to touch the data. They can change how much is displayed and how it looks, but that's all."

Myka nibbled at the one of the apple slices that she had virtuously selected as the side to her sandwich rather than chips or the ancient grains roll. "So a portfolio manager or financial planner changed the data in a report on the start-ups?"

"It wasn't blatant. In the most recent report, I had included information about a potential lawsuit against the biggest of the start-ups claiming patent infringement. While there's no impact on current performance, the potential adverse effect could be enormous. Even a settlement out of court could seriously affect the company's financials. You can't hide information like that from investors."

"But the firm did hide it because it wasn't in the final version of the report." Myka tried to keep her tone as neutral and bland as possible. "How does a report that goes through multiple reviews get altered like that without someone calling attention to it?"

"What you're really asking," Helena said bitterly, "is why I didn't call attention to it." She flashed Myka an angry look. "Because after the back-and-forth with the portfolio manager and the financial planners, there would be a consensus on the 'final' of any particular report, and it was my understanding that it was this version of the report that would be sent to the investors." She plunged her straw up and down to break up the ice in her cup. Myka thought it might be in lieu of stabbing her with it. "I never felt the need to ensure that another version of the report – one I didn't know about – wasn't being sent instead. But after you and your partner visited me, I realized that there was nothing other than basic honesty and integrity to keep a portfolio manager or planner from making alterations to a final report without telling me." There was a screech of plastic as she sent the straw with extra force through the lid. "I lived with Stuart McKnight. I should know better than to trust that the sun will come up in the morning. It's not as easy as you might think to get hold of that report, and you don't want to know how I did, but that's how I know the report was altered. The report sent to the investors in the start-ups didn't have the information about the lawsuit."

"Could it have been an error? Someone made a small change and inadvertently deleted other information?" Myka didn't believe it, having seen the effort to which the mysterious whistleblower had gone to ensure that Helena was implicated in the fraud, but she needed to have Helena explain how she knew that she had been targeted.

Helena turned her head away from her, but Myka detected the slight tremble in her voice. "The metadata says I was the last one to modify the report. That prompted me to search for others, and the ones sent to the investors over the past couple of months have all been altered, data added or changed to make the start-ups seem to be in better shape than they were. Not better by leaps and bounds but enough to convince investors to leave their money in the companies. Each report was last modified by me."

"You have copies of the reports as you last left them, so you were able to compare the two sets?"

"The final version," Helena caught herself, "what I thought was the final version is saved in the shared drive and it's deleted once the report is sent to the investors. The sent report _is_ the final report. The only copies I have are working copies, and the data have all been written over." She didn't fully turn her head around to meet Myka's gaze. Their eyes only obliquely met before Helena directed hers down at the ground. "Your choices are few, Myka. You either believe there's a conspiracy to frame me – because portfolio managers don't have administrator rights to log onto the system as other users – or you believe that I'm lying. Given my history, if I were you, I know what I'd believe."

"You're ignoring several alternative theories – your evil twin, SPECTRE, the Borg," Myka said gravely.

Helena laughed; it was wobbly with tension, but it was still a laugh. "We might as well throw in amnesia and an alternate reality. Maybe Stuart teleported himself out of prison. . . ." Her laughter died. "That will never be funny – in any reality."

"I need to know who has administrative rights to the computers, when the reports were modified for the last time, the name of the portfolio manager for the start-ups." Myka fired off items in the hopes of getting Helena to concentrate on something concrete, something that she could do to feel in control. "I also need to know what other reports of yours might have been altered. The sooner you can get this information to me the better. No long radio silence. Can we meet again next week?"

Helena looked as if she might object but ended up listlessly shrugging her shoulders. "I'll do my best, but I have to be careful. I can't afford to raise suspicion."

"The problem is that you already have."

The walk back was silent but oddly more comfortable. The force field around Helena that Myka had kept bumping against on their walk to the river had weakened, if it hadn't been completely lowered. Maybe she had decided that the FBI wasn't her worst enemy. Myka would have preferred a partnership in which she wasn't seen as the least of all possible evils, but if Helena were never able to regard her and her job as anything other than threats to her happiness, then it would only be right that all that resentment and distaste should dim Helena's attractiveness. Myka should be able to sneak a look at that face and not feel a flicker of interest, yet she couldn't see the worry lines and the unsmiling set of Helena's mouth and not want to draw that face against her shoulder and whisper into that hair, smelling of sunshine and the sweetness of shampoo, that everything was going to be all right. She knew better, not only because it was Helena whom she wanted to comfort and reassure but because everything didn't always work out okay. Sometimes getting the real bad guy was a victory that didn't outweigh the pain, or the harm.

"Whose lunch did I inadvertently take? Whose coffee cup did I use without permission?" Helena demanded. "Despite my relationship with Stuart, I'm not a hateful person. Although if you talk to my ex, the one before Stuart, I suppose you'd get a different opinion." Myka waged a brief, intense, but ultimately successful battle not to ask about the ex. Helena's life before Stuart had revealed no brushes with the law, so there was no professional need to dig. She wasn't dating Helena, so there was no personal need either. No need period, yet after a darting, unfathomable look, Helena said, "Her name is Giselle, part-time model, full-time socialite."

Of course her former girlfriend was a model, and Myka suddenly felt very drab in her gray linen pantsuit. She had thought it summery and elegant when she had put it on this morning, now she looked like she was wearing a wrinkled, gray bedsheet. ". . . . When we lived together, Giselle was always complaining that I used her toothpaste, her body wash, her razor instead of my own. But hogging the toiletries doesn't justify setting me up for fraud." Her eyes were frozen wide with disbelief, and Myka understood that the mockery was Helena's means of distancing herself from the realization that the refuge she thought she had found had left her only the more exposed. "Was one of Stuart's relatives a victim of theirs? Do they think it's time I get what I deserve?"

"It may not be about hurting you but using you to hurt someone else," Myka said. They were nearing an intersection, on the other side of which and just a few buildings away was Amundson Securities.

"You mean the Amundsons." Helena paused. "Scott's a big proponent of renewable energy, but it's Nolan's friends and business associates who have the money to risk."

Myka was about to ask her if she knew of any co-workers who were upset with the Amundsons, angry that they had been passed over for promotions or raises, when she saw Helena's eyes widen again, this time in alarm. "Play along with me?" she heard Helena mutter, and Myka barely had time to nod before Helena was stepping in front of her, rising on the balls of her feet to take Myka's lips gently between hers. Stage kiss, Myka told herself, she's doing this because she wants to avoid someone . . . something, but the stern reminders had little effect. The kiss was all artifice, a diversion, but it felt strangely natural. She and Helena hadn't kissed before, but they might have, because she didn't feel the awkwardness and the self-consciousness that usually accompanied a first kiss. Maybe that was why as the kiss began to warm, ever so slightly, Myka's hand found its way to the small of Helena's back to press her closer. Helena didn't resist; her lips parted, and the kiss became more searching. For a moment, it could have been any sunny afternoon and Myka and her girlfriend spontaneously sharing a kiss.

Helena wasn't her girlfriend, and this kiss needed to stop. Now. But it wasn't one of those clean endings to a kiss, it was a dragged-out one, their lips inexplicably adhering, their hands, Myka's on Helena's back and Helena's on Myka's shoulders, slow to slip away. Helena exhaled a soft, wondering laugh, and Myka was sure that her eyes were glazed over. "Helena?" The man's voice held almost as much uncertainty as Helena's laugh.

The blunt but friendly features of Nate, Helena's friend from the fair, were screwing into an expression that was more pained than quizzical. "Nate," Helena said with a discomfort that didn't sound feigned.

"You flew out after the meeting before I had a chance to ask you if you want to grab some lunch together." He put his hands in the pockets of his khakis and rolled his shoulders forward, the concession of a man who realizes that the hopes prompting his invitation are destined to be disappointed.

"Myka called," Helena said, a blush climbing into her cheeks, and Myka recognized that kissing as they had been kissing at the last, in full view of passersby, anyone and everyone on the street, in fact, was not the kind of public display Helena felt comfortable making. Feeling her own cheeks warm as she recalled what Nate had witnessed, Myka acknowledged it wasn't something she typically did either, not even with Andi, who had a much higher tolerance for the theatrics of kissing. "She had a few minutes free . . . . " Helena's voice trailed off in embarrassment. "Nothing like finding a woman's child to sweep her off her feet. We just, ah, hit it off, and things have developed from there." She directed the violently pleading look of a trapped animal at Myka, and Myka smiled her best "I'm crazy about her" grin, which she hadn't whipped out since her first year with Andi, and clutched Helena's hand.

"That's great," Nate said weakly. He jerked his thumb vaguely toward a Starbucks and then it drifted toward a grocery mart and liquor store squeezed between two buildings advertising lofts for rent. Myka wasn't sure whether he intended to drown his sorrows in an Americano or a fifth of bourbon. "See you back at the office." He clumsily walked backward a few steps then spun away to charge up the street, away from them.

"I panicked," Helena said remorsefully. "I couldn't remember what he knew about you, if he knew you were FBI. I didn't want him to remember _that_ , so I opted for a soul-crushing kiss." She bit her lip, and Myka couldn't repress the desire to take it between her own teeth; she knew for a fact now how soft it was. Soul-crushing might be how Nate experienced seeing the kiss, but she would never regard it so bleakly, even if Helena turned out to be a party to a fraud. It was nice to be reminded that there was life – and desire – after Andi. In a tone more resigned than remorseful, Helena added, "If I'm perfectly honest, I also kissed you because I wanted to squelch Nate's interest before things got awkward at work. He's never actually asked me out, but he's been hinting, and I didn't want to confront him. The last thing I want to do is attract any negative attention." She stopped herself mid-sigh. "Don't remind me, I'm all too aware that someone has put a target on my back."

"If it puts you at ease, Nate wouldn't remember from meeting me and Pete at the fair that we're agents. That conversation was over before he arrived, so if he suspects . . . ." Myka let the implication hang between them.

Helena emphatically shook her head. "Believe me, I haven't once mentioned you at work."

Just in case she had been tempted to read too much into the kiss . . . Myka put the distraction that was Helena aside and tried to concentrate on Nate. "Does he have the administrative rights to log onto the system as you?" She sidestepped a pug sniffing her ankles. The pug's owner tugged at the leash and sent Myka a reproving look for hogging the sidewalk. Myka pulled Helena aside.

She didn't notice, emphatically shaking her head again. "Yes, but no, no. He's a good man and a pathetically poor liar. I've seen him cover for some of the younger, less experienced tech staff when they've failed to fix a problem. He'll try to pass off a mistake as his to spare them a vice president's meltdown. He wouldn't set me up like that. He wouldn't set anyone up. He's not the type. He's not Stuart." Her eyes had become flat and hard and impossibly black, discs once more.

They're not born the "type." They have to grow into it, even Stuart. Myka knew the better course was not to contradict her. "That may be, but he has one motive I can think of. We still need to check him out. What's his last name?"

Helena rolled her eyes. "That's right, he's dying of unrequited love for me." She irritably passed her hand across her face. "It was a cheap trick, and I should have been honest with him instead." Myka regarded her steadily, without judgement, which seemed to rattle Helena the more. She burst out, "His last name is Phillips. Nathan Phillips. Do what you have to do."

The return bus ride smelled of exhaust, and Myka saw a line of thunderstorms on the horizon. Everything seemed a little dimmer, a little chintzier now, the investigation into Amundson Securities already feeling like it had lasted forever. She tugged at her hair, which felt tangled and windblown, and wondered self-consciously how it had appeared to Helena. Rather than heading for her own desk when she was back in the office, she headed for Pete's, feeling jumpy and hemmed in; if she stretched her arms out, she would be pressing against the suite's walls. Not literally, of course, but she didn't want to be boxed in or constrained, she wanted . . . she didn't know. She thought she might run up and down the aisles between the cubes yelling, like a kid or Pete might.

She found him eating. It was a rarity not to find him eating. He was working through a family-sized bag of Doritos, a travel mug of Coke or Mountain Dew as large as a gallon of milk serving as a paperweight and holding down a sheaf of paper. He wasn't technically her partner; the office was too small to justify any such permanent arrangement. She worked with all the agents on various assignments, but she didn't think it was her imagination that she and Pete were partnered with each other more frequently than they were partnered with other agents. Seven years they had worked together, and from day one, they had been brother and sister. It could have worked out differently between them, theoretically at least. Putting aside the dismal survival rates of a workplace romance, she and Pete would appear to be well matched. They shared certain core sensibilities – the necessity of both justice _and_ compassion, the belief that there was a greater purpose than the pursuit of self-interest, and a wry appreciation of how often bureaucracies complicated something that should be simple. They rooted for the same teams (although, when it came to football, Pete retained his childhood affection for the Cleveland Browns) and they were dedicated in their different ways to keeping fit. His clowning around lowered her stress levels, and her level-headedness kept him from, as he put it, falling into a hole with a bottle at the bottom of it. She could even admit that he had a boyish appeal, while he had once grudgingly confessed that had they gone to the same high school, he probably would have asked her out. On paper, they were better suited for each other than either's former romantic partners, yet she couldn't imagine Pete spontaneously kissing her as Helena had, and they would have been making faces as soon as the kiss was over, as if they had just swallowed a mouthful of peas. There was the one who checked all the boxes, the perfect match, and then there was chemistry, and rarely was one found with the other, at least in her experience. Myka could all too easily imagine herself kissing Helena again; she would rather give herself a root canal than kiss Pete.

"Hey," he said, "how did it go?" He showed her his hands, palms out, fingers spread. "Why has no one ever thought to use Doritos instead of ink to fingerprint people?" Each of his fingertips was liberally coated with nacho cheese spice. "It's not any messier, plus you can lick your fingers clean." Observing him as he laved each finger clean like a cat, Myka concluded that there was nothing, up to and including the threat of death, that could make her kiss him. "Seriously, how did it go?" He hooked his foot around the leg of the other chair in his cube and dragged it out for her to sit in. "You look hyper, and you never look hyper. What'd she do to you, confess to everything, this crappy little scam at Amundson Securities and McKnight's fraud?"

Myka surprised herself by slumping into the chair with an appreciative grunt. She hadn't thought that the meeting with Helena, with its distinct ups and downs, would have taken that much out of her. "The opposite. She says someone's been altering her work, making it look like she falsified the condition of the start-ups."

"Who does she think is behind it?" Pete sucked on the straw of his travel mug. He stopped long enough to ineffectively smother a belch, then clamped his mouth around the straw.

"She doesn't know. Whoever it is has been careful." Pete's desk was cluttered with sports figure bobbleheads, dead travel mugs, Star Wars and Marvel action figures. It was a miracle he could do any work among them, but he did, claiming that Han Solo and Steph Curry were inspiring. "What she's said has been done to her work is consistent with the information sent to Kosan."

"Except for the fact that our anonymous friend claims that she did it," Pete supplied.

"Right, only that. A small thing," Myka said with a sardonically crooked smile. She gestured at the mess of lunch, toys, and papers on his desk. "What have you found out about the start-ups?"

"From their websites, little that's useful. Mainly a lot of hot air about how they're going to change our energy consumption patterns, reduce our carbon footprint, etcetera, etcetera." He turned to his desk and shuffled some of the paper. "On two of these LLCs, we've gotten a Dr. Mac Horner listed as a governor. Did some digging on him. He's got a Ph.D. from Stanford in chemical engineering. Pretty brainy, right? A lot of scientific knowhow. He's also been investigated by the SEC for securities fraud. We sniffed around, too, but nothing came of it. A few years ago, he set up a couple of companies that folded. One company was going to convert chemical waste water to drinking water through a 'revolutionary process,'" Pete said with heavy sarcasm. "The other company was selling some sort of filtration device that you could use to keep the air and water inside your house free of radiation if we got nuked." He laughed. "It was the size of a kitchen fire extinguisher. It's gonna save you from fallout, yeah."

"So he's a con. What's his connection to the Amundsons?"

"None that I can find. Maybe he got chased out by the other investors. But, but," Pete held up a finger and faced Myka, "the L.A. office sent someone out to check a wind farm owned by one of the LLCs. He saw only scrub grass and rock, which is not what the website shows. An agent from the Phoenix office went out to a solar farm. There were only a few of those solar panel thingys, and they were busted."

"If the start-ups were fraudulent from the start, it's unlikely Helena's part of it."

Pete cocked his head, his gaze knowing. "That's not the first conclusion I jumped to." Myka didn't look away, but she could feel warmth flood her chest and neck. "I was thinking Irene might have the right idea about ol' Nolan. Official state grandfather, my ass. More like official state grifter. Maybe he brought Helena in to be the fall guy. Maybe he brought her in to keep the con running longer."

"We don't know enough yet to be speculating like this. We don't know enough about the Amundsons, about their businesses, or how they became involved with these start-ups." Myka restlessly got up from the chair. "I've asked her to bring me something tangible."

"When do you meet with her again?"

"Soon, I hope. She feels exposed, but I tried to convince her that time's not on her side." Myka struck a casual pose, leaning against the end of the panel that marked the entrance to his cube. Pete's glance at her over the top of his travel mug told her she was anything but. "I have a cover story for meeting with her now. I'm her new girlfriend."

Pete almost perforated his lip on the straw. "Do I even want to know how this happened?" He sucked his Coke meditatively, then said, "Hell, yes." Lowering his voice, he suggested, "Maybe we should talk about this part outside the office. If you don't have plans tonight, we could order out for pizza, watch some Big Bang Theory episodes I DVR'd, talk about girl-lovin'."

As unappealing as all of it sounded, it was better than how she would be spending the evening. "Dinner with Mom and Dad, sorry."

"Whose pet did you run over to deserve that?"

"You like my mom," Myka pointed out.

"Your mom's great. It's your dad who gives me an ulcer." Pete rubbed his stomach protectively. The humor left his face, and he said quietly, "Really, we're going to need to talk about how you ended up with that cover story."

Most people would stare at their piles of work – whether they were represented by folder icons on a shared drive or literally teetered on the edge of a desktop was immaterial – and count how many hours they had left before they could push the piles aside and go home. Instead, Myka would check the time in the corner of her screen in the futile hope that she still had hours to go before she had to leave. Six o'clock was as late as she could push it, since it would take her a half-hour to 45 minutes to reach her parents' modest duplex, which meant her father would be eating dinner considerably later than he liked. He was never one to silently make a sacrifice, so she would hear sometime during the evening that he was very glad his eldest daughter could spare a few hours from her busy, busy schedule to share a _late_ dinner with her parents. He chose to ignore the fact that she usually dropped by on the weekends, not for long but long enough to reassure herself that her mother wasn't going crazy having her husband underfoot. Myka would taste-test a new cookie recipe or confirm the list of dried fruit, nuts, candy chips, and other delectables that she and her mother would pick up at the grocery store for future batches of cookies. Going up and down the aisles wasn't a chore, it was a mini-vacation because they went without Myka's father.

Tonight her parents' kitchen smelled of meatloaf, and on the kitchen table that Myka remembered from the old apartment, crowded into a nook too small for it, there were three plates, with a baked potato wrapped in foil on each. Flanking the loaf pan holding the meatloaf were bowls of corn and green beans. This was definitely her father's kind of meal, meat, starch, and not a leafy green to be seen. As she pulled her chair out as far as it would go, which wasn't very far because of the wall just behind it, her father rubbed his hands in satisfaction. "The hours you keep, I bet you don't eat like this."

"You're right" she said, deadpan, "I don't often eat like this."

It had taken her several years, but Myka had finally broken her parents of asking her about work. There was little she could divulge, and her father no longer had a readymade target for his diatribes about the waste and ineffectiveness of government agencies. He had enormous pride in her being an agent but none in the FBI, which he believed spent millions of taxpayer dollars while letting criminals go free. She was sure he secretly envisioned her busting down doors and putting guns to people's heads, one part Eliot Ness to two parts Dirty Harry. She was a one-woman vigilante force, wearing all of the FBI's hardware but burdened by none of the laws that governed the FBI's actions. Instead of complaining about her employer, her father groused about politics, football, and arthritis, and when he was finished with those topics, he would open a well-worn paperback of Sudoku puzzles and work on them through dinner.

With little change, an older, less up-to-date kitchen and, in her case, braces on her teeth, Myka could be eating her meatloaf in the old apartment. It was the same down to the mismatched silverware and the ketchup glaze on the meatloaf. Her parents had sold the bookstore a few years ago. They had held out against the incursion of the chain bookstores, the recession, even Amazon, her father steadfastly maintaining that an independent bookseller was one of the last bastions of democracy, but they hadn't held out against an above-market price offered by a developer who wanted to turn the bookstore and its neighboring buildings into a mixed-use facility – condos on the upper stories, upscale shops on the main level. While she wouldn't have minded skewering her father on his sudden change of heart, she wouldn't hurt her mother. The bookstore had barely paid for itself during the good years, located on what was then a seedier side of the city's downtown. Jeannie Bering deserved a decent home and a nest egg as well as a chance to see if she could finally get her (very) modest cookie business off the ground. It was one thing for Myka's mother to help manage a cousin's storefront at the fair, it was another to take her two-weeks-every-summer experience at the Cookie Shack and turn it into a business.

Putting aside his puzzle, her father said, "Your mother and I keep waiting for you to bring someone with you to dinner. You're not still pining for Andi Martino, are you? You wait for her much longer, and you'll be too old to start a family with someone else."

That was still the same, too. There was always something she had done – or hadn't done – that her father saw fit to criticize. Almost thirty-five years of practice (she was sure she hadn't escaped his disappointment as a baby either) had taught her how to tune him out (sort of), but the comment about her pining for Andi rankled her more than his other gibes, maybe because she was a little worried herself, not that she wouldn't find someone else but that, down deep, she would regret the someone else wasn't Andi. She had been so head-over-heels for her, Myka sometimes feared she wouldn't feel as strongly for anyone else. But she had long since learned not to show her father her doubts, it wouldn't earn her any sympathy. "I've got plenty of time yet to start a family," she said coolly.

"Your father's trying to lead up to something . . . only not very well," her mother said, glaring at her husband. "A new accountant has joined Kevin's firm. Tracy's met her and thinks the two of you might hit it off. Your sister has the contact information, if you want to set up a coffee date." Her mother's look expressed all the hope that she had schooled out of her voice.

The last time Tracy had met someone who would be perfect for her, Myka had spent the date not-so-surreptitiously texting Pete to have him rescue her. She had been joined by her date in searching for an excuse to end a meeting that within five minutes had revealed how incompatible they were. Tracy had fixed her up with a divorced internist at the family clinic at which she worked as an insurance claims specialist. The internist was pleasant and pleasant-looking enough, but they had no sooner shaken hands when he announced, "I'm not really interested in a relationship right now," which made Myka wonder what Tracy had told him about her. She wasn't ready either, since Andi had left for Los Angeles only three months before, but she was willing to entertain the remote possibility that she might fall in love virtually at first sight – again. Until the internist opened his mouth and shriveled that tiny little possibility to a crisp. She had spent the rest of the evening in Pete's apartment, playing video games and eating pizza. _Call of Duty_ and a family-sized meat lover's pizza – she wouldn't willingly admit it to him but she had enjoyed both.

Myka toyed with her slice of meatloaf, trying to cut away the ketchup glaze. It didn't do anything to get rid of the Velveeta that glued the hamburger and onions together. She would have to be careful, too much information and her father would be on the Internet doing his own background investigation, but it could spare her from her family's matchmaking, well, indefinitely. "I've just started seeing someone," she said, cautiously lifting her eyes to meet her parents'. If she couldn't look them in their eyes as she told them, they (meaning her father) wouldn't believe her. "It's early days, but I don't want to see anyone else; I want to see how this plays out."

Her father grunted, "Care to share a little about this Ms. or Mr. Wonderful?"

"If and when I have something I want to share, I'll let you know."

He made a sour face in response but didn't comment. He picked up his pencil and bent over his Sudoku puzzle. Myka's mother mouthed "Good luck" and pointed to the meatloaf, encouraging her to take more. Myka sighed and cut herself another slice. She wasn't sure why she hadn't simply told her mother she wasn't interested in being fixed up. Helena Wells walked around with a little rain cloud above her head, and her hasty fabrication of a relationship between the two of them could end up causing more problems than it was intended to solve. Giving the lie carrying power by using it to get out of a blind date . . . what had she been thinking of? The kiss, Myka admitted to herself. Hours had passed since her meeting with Helena, but her lips were still tingling from the kiss.


End file.
